Youtube: What makes you stay longer

A glance at the watch and oh! you've just spend an extra hour on youtube, the world's third largest visited website. 

A cool video that you checked out let you to another video and that led to another and this continued till you realized that you had just spent some extra time, tubing on youtube.

I decided to look into what it was in the design that made us watch the extra videos and here is what I found.

#1 Related Videos concept

This is the section which is the on the right side of the video you are watching and contains the videos related to the current one. The advantage of this section is that it helps you find a video that might be more relevant or a in relation to what you are looking for.

#2 Videos recommended for you

This is something which went un-noticed since I used to directly search what I wanted. On the front page of Youtube this section comes below the featured video. The best part of this section is that it recommends you videos based on the those  you have watched previously.

#3 Your Candidate

This part I thought is one of the best things Youtube has given to this world. Your candidate's channel on Youtube. Before the elections we get to know about the candidate only through news channels and party rallies. A Youtube channel of the candidate, where your candidate expresses his ideology and his agenda is something very valuable in-order to give a mass appeal. And yes, you can also contribute through Google checkout. Although I can't say much about the Obama-Hillary campaign, but I can surely say that at this pace youtube might soon overtake other video sources(television).

#4 Featured Video

The featured video is another cool feature.It helps you look outside you tube scope

#5 Most Active videos

Lastly, you can also see what the world has been watching. This is not one of the best things, I'd say about Youtube since the most active videos have the most freaky titles, which could lead you to an embarrassing situation.

 

Anything else that you think has kept you glued to Youtube, let me know

A popular application Scrabulous that was built around the concept of Scrabble has been banned by Facebook. The developers, brothers, Rajat and Jayant, have been served a legal notice by toymaker Mattel, that owns the rights to the original word-building game outside the United States.
Hasbro and Mattel launched their own official Scrabble app on Facebook but it has only 70,000 active users,as compared to the 500,00 daily users on Scrabulous (Only 10 percent of the number of Scrabulous users at its peak.)
Mattel approached the Indian courts earlier this year and the case is still pending. As a result India is the only country where Facebook users can still access the application. In light of their legal troubles, the Agarwalla brothers have launched another word-building game 'Wordscraper' which uses circles instead of squares, has a marginally different scoring system and lets users design their own boards.
The Agarwalla brothers renamed their app Wordscrapper and tweaked it so users could design their own boards, in a bid to avoid legal proceedings.
Jayant Agarwalla said: "It surprises us that Mattel chose to direct Facebook to take down Scrabulous without waiting for the decision [of the Indian courts]. Mattel's action speaks volumes about their business practices and respect for the judiciary."

Wiredness.com is an image manipulation website that allows you to manipulate images. It is currently in its beta phase but the features it offers can help it make a popular website in future. It is more for photo enthusiasts who want to experiment with their images and don't want to use a software like the adobe photoshop. The interface it gives is much like your file explorer interface make it intuitive and easy.

The scoial bookmarking available helps you to bookmark your images easily.

It includes support for multiple languages which for now only includes a German, Portuguese and Turkish version but French and Chinese versions will be added soon.

It has been integrated with picasa and flickr. The integration is not bug free but there are plans to smoothen it in future.

As a developer you can use the API provided by wiredness.

So wire yourself to the website and check it out at www.wiredness.com

Orkut is the most famous social networking websites in India. As the developers of orkut are facing problem in converting the popularity of the website into big bucks, the website is riding high on its powerful networking feature and easy interface. Recently (Nov last year ) Google introduced the opensocial application programming interface (API) following the trend started by Facebook.

I recently met two developers at the Delhi Bar camp 4 where they demonstrated how they had developed an application on Facebook last year and how it brought their server down within few months because of the enormous amount of traffic (million page views daily). Finally they decided to sell their application in January this year. Not a bad start for two students.

According to the CHIP magazine, 8 out of 19 applications on Orkut have been developed in India. A game Teen Patti is attracting a lot of people and is all set to become a rage in future. Teen patti which is a cards game played by people on festive occasions can be players between people and the players can chat with each other. It also has a ranking system that tells you who is the best player.

The successful social networking website Orkut is still proving to be a fat elephant to push in terms of revenue it is generating. Manu Rekhi, the product general manager of Google says that it is just a matter of time. It took three years to get the search revenue model right.

Empressr.com is a website which can be used to make free presentations on the internet without buying an expensive presentation maker(Empressr composer). It is free to use and an account gives you 5Mb of space to upload your images,audio clips and other media .These have been termed as assets on the Empressr presentation maker tool. The tool is mostly intuitive and you should not have any problem using it. Apart from that, the presentation maker offers you a wide array of powerful tools to enhance your presentation and add animations to it. The rotation button is available on almost any component you put in the presentation which helps you rotate it to the best suited format.The chart option is also very impressive and helps you build customized charts.Overall to make a presentation on the internet,which can also be rated is a very good concept.Yes your presentation can be rated by other empress users(the empressrs). It can be used by bloggers and the web developers to add presentations, just as videos to their web pages. you just need a good internet connection to begin with and go on to have a lot of fun while creating presentations.

More on Empressr from Empressr.com

Empressr is developed by the people at Fusebox, an award winning Creative and Technology firm that designs custom web based integrated marketing and business solutions for clients like JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Time Warner and MTV Networks.


Tag line

The First Online Application That Lets You Create, Manage and Share Rich Media Presentations Online

Go to Empressr.com

View the techreef's presentation on Empressr

Screen shot of the pagemaker

Web review

MetaGlossary.com is a search website which searches for 2,000,000 key words and phrases and gives you the answer. It is currently in the beta phase.
In short the website is a search engine and in case you don't find any result it shows you the other options you could have looked for and also allows you to add an answer.You can get add a firefox add on of MetaGlossary

Metaglossary is a glossary of a huge number of key words and terms that you may not always need and secondly the results you get are in such a form that you will seldom read them.The main point is that we already have services of google,wikipedia and answers at our disposal and they are in fact very good and give you what you want.It is just a waste of time to search on the meta glossary.But to leave my imprint I have added the meaning of techreef om the blog.


Visit Metaglossary.com

If a genie granted you a wish, would "The ability to access other people's Gmail accounts" be it? Abdulaziz Al-Shalabi from Kuwait wasn't visited by a genie, but he was granted access to Gmail accounts that were not his -- for a considerable period of time at that!

The goof-up began last weekend and only stopped on Wednesday. As it happened, Al-Shalabi was incessantly trying to access his Gmail, and he just wasn't able to. It's not clear whether entering his own username and password -- or random ones -- allowed him access to other Gmail accounts. But as he reported to News.com, he got a peek into the private information of over 30 Gmail users.
The problem apparently occurred only over Al-Shalabi's ISP and with Gmail accounts; it didn't work with Hotmail accounts, for example. Having heard the news, a Gmail user in Sri Lanka reported a similar experience.

Acknowledging the problem, a Google spokesman said the goof-up had occurred in Kuwait because of a server caching problem the ISP was facing. He said Google was in contact with the ISP in question in order to find a solution. It's not known whether other Google sites were also affected by the ISP's problem, and if so, to what extent.

This is certainly a one-off incident, and we're certainly not trying to say you should switch away from Gmail. What's to be learnt is that the system isn't foolproof, and that it's possible for your mail to become accessible to others -- which, we bet, most of you would have thought impossible (unless your password is "abc123" and someone guessed it, in which case you deserve it).

If you're the really paranoid kind, and this bit of news has shaken you more than a bit, you might consider encrypting sensitive mails (such as those in which you call your boss an unfortunate accident of evolution) using a free service such as Hushmail.

Source:techtree.com

The internet revolution is on and a lot of people are cashing in on it.The basic thing you need to follow the same trend is a website.But what kind of website?
A website can increase traffic and it can also turn away traffic. I have seen quite a lot of websites and depending on the nature of my work, I used a particular one. I liked a few websites and also disliked a few.So I decided to list 5 important features that could make a website successful

1. Genuine(unique) content/concept
2. Focussed area
3. Simplicity
4. Ease of access
5. Relevance