Social Machinery

Youtube has surprised us during the last weeks with several new developments in its service like upgrades, new functionalities and system improvements.

On the new services side, we have an experimental project called Youtube Music Discovery Project which consists on a intelligent search engine where by introducing an artist, its generates a playlist of all music videos of that artist available on YouTube. You can also create your own playlists in a very easy and intuitive way by adding or removing songs, or even creating remixes even while you are listening to some of the songs.

Another interesting functionality that many are starting to appreciate is the greater support for videos using the HTML5 standard, This implies stop using the add Flash Video for watching videos in MP4 format and use H264 compression directly from the browser. For enabling this, you need to have a browser that has already adopted this standard like Chrome or Safari.

Least but not last, Youtube is showing a glimpse of future services: Video rental. Now you can pay for watching some of  Youtube’s content. The service has begun offering independent films on the web albeit enabling users to pay for rent using Google Checkout. Currently, the service is only available in the US.

Youtube is still struggling to monetize their enormous amount of traffic and is starting to feel the competitive pressure from music stores like iTunes and services like Spotify or Grooveshark. These new improvements seems to aim in the right direction to keep Youtube at the Top