YouTube has announced it will begin offering HTML5 videos in the WebM codec to web browsers that support it. So far YouTube says that it has encoded 30 percent of its videos in WebM, which accounts for 99 percent of all traffic to the site.
The WebM Project, a partnership between Google, Mozilla, Opera and dozens of other software and hardware makers, provides web developers a way of embedding video and audio in HTML5 pages without plug-ins, and without the need to pay the expensive licensing fees that surround the competing H.264 codec. Currently WebM video works in Firefox 4, Chrome, Opera and Internet Explorer (via a plugin). The other main HTML5 video codec, H.264, works on all Apple devices and in Internet Explorer 9.
While YouTube is adding WebM support, it isn’t following Chrome’s lead and dropping H.264. The site will continue to serve up H.264 video to those browsers that support it (in other words, Safari, Mobile Safari and Internet Explorer 9).
Despite the new WebM support, YouTube still isn’t serving up HTML5 videos by default. If you’d like to get in on the new WebM fun, you’ll still need to sign up for the opt-in HTML5 player.
ProgrammableWeb's stat for API protocols and data formats
Once a novel idea that seemed limited to Flickr, the web-based API is now everywhere you turn — Twitter, Foursquare, Google Maps and thousands of other sites offer up their data in the form of an API.
APIs mean that third-party developers can build their own tools and mashups, which in turn helps to fuel the popularity of the web service. It’s hard to imagine where sites like Flickr and Twitter would be today without APIs.
In fact, these days some web services don’t even bother launching websites to go with their APIs — the API is the service. The SimpleGeo API, for example, doesn’t really have a corresponding website, it’s just an API that can be used anywhere, including inside mobile apps.
And APIs aren’t just something for external developers anymore. Increasingly web services are building their own sites and tools around their APIs — after all, why bother with an API if you aren’t going to use it yourself? Twitter is a good example of the “eat your own dog food” approach to APIs; Twitter’s website and its mobile clients are both developed off the same Twitter API that outside developers can tap into.
Former Webmonkey writer Adam DuVander, now Executive Editor at ProgrammableWeb, recently announced that ProgrammableWeb, an API tracking site, now lists some 3000 web-based APIs. To go along with that milestone DuVander breaks down some of the trends in today’s APIs.
It will come as no surprise to those actively developing or using APIs, but the overwhelming trend in APIs is moving toward serving JSON data over a REST interface. As DuVander notes in his post, how many “REST APIs” are truly RESTful is debatable, but certainly SOAP is on its way out and HTTP coupled with OAuth is the future.
When it comes to the data APIs serve up, XML is still the most used format, but JSON is hot on its heels and growing much faster. Even though there are still more XML APIs, the more recent the API, the more likely it’s serving JSON. In many cases — like Twitter’s streaming API and Foursquare’s updated API — companies are rapidly moving from XML to JSON.
The biggest thing that sticks out from ProgrammableWeb’s API trends is that the API, once a sort of “hey, that’s cool” option for progressive websites, is now a first class citizen of the web. Perhaps eventually something better than the REST/OAuth/JSON combo will come along, but the the API and the idea behind it — making data available to the entire web — isn’t going anywhere.
According to a leaked photo, Yahoo plans to close a number of services, including Yahoo Buzz, MyBlogLog and Delicious, the popular bookmarking site.
Most of the closing services are Yahoo projects that simply never went anywhere, but Delicious, which Yahoo acquired in 2005, was once the king of bookmarks and helped popularize many of the key elements of today’s social web.
Delicious (Del.icio.us in its original incarnation) popularized tags as a more flexible alternative to folders, introduced us to the idea of following other users and helped kick off the “share it with the world” trend that created today’s social websites like Twitter and Facebook.
Under Yahoo’s leadership Delicious ceased to be innovative. Delicious remains a useful service, but it hasn’t really improved on its original features in almost half a decade.
It’s unclear what will happen to Delicious. So far Yahoo hasn’t made any official announcement, nor has the company given any hint of when or how Delicious will head into the sunset, but one thing is for sure: the web will be poorer without it.
Fortunately for Delicious users its impending demise doesn’t mean your bookmarks will disappear forever. It’s actually quite easy to export your bookmarks, and there are dozens of services that can import them and replace Delicious in your workflow.
I’ve been a heavy Delicious user ever since the demise of its competitor Ma.gnolia. I bookmarked sites, scraped the API and stored the bookmarks on my own server (you can find the details of those scripts in our Django tutorial). I also relied on feeds from other people to find news, links and other tidbits for Webmonkey.
The first part of that workflow is easy to replace. I signed up for Pinboard.in, which lacks some of Delicious’ sharing features, but offers a mirror of the Delicious API. I imported my Delicious bookmarks into Pinboard, changed the root url in my scripts and effectively replaced Delicious in less than 10 minutes. If you don’t want to pay for Pinboard, Zootool, StumbleUpon and other services also make fine Delicious replacements.
But Delicious isn’t just a bookmarking service, it’s a fantastic resource for finding links, stories and the latest news about nearly anything that interested you. Its popularity make its reach extensive. You can easily tap into the minds of friends, colleagues and strangers to see what they’re reading on the web. The concept of tags makes it easy to find links related to any topic or combination of topics that interests you.
ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick likens the impending death of Delicious to “setting a museum on fire.” Where, asks Kirkpatrick, “are you going to find a reading list of the best collected written works and other multimedia about almost any given topic?”
Put simply: nowhere.
Twitter is a possibility. Delicious even used Twitter for some of its real-time search features. But Twitter isn’t dedicated to links the way Delicious is so you’ll have to put up with a lot more noise to find the same stories. Facebook may fill the gap for people. It’s also possible that Pinboard or another service will grow in the wake of Delicious’ collapse and come to offer a similar depth and breath of links.
Exactly what will happen to all those links currently stored on Delicious remains to be seen. It’s possible Yahoo may sell off Delicious, but in the absence of a statement from Yahoo, many users have already assumed the worst.
Hopefully Yahoo will at least keep the Delicious domain active, even if the service is not. Perhaps the Archive Team — which saved Geocities from death at the hands of Yahoo — can scrape and mirror Delicious.
For those that have only vaguely heard of Delicious and don’t see what the fuss is, just re-read the above replacing the word Delicious with the word Flickr or even Facebook. This is the template I’ll be using five years from now when Facebook meets the same fate.
SAN FRANCISCO, California — Google unveiled a beta version of its Chrome OS Tuesday morning.
The company showed off the operating system, which has been in development for over a year, during a press event here. Also making an appearance at Tuesday’s event was the Chrome Web Store, which we expected to see launch today. If you’re using the Chrome browser, you can visit the store and start installing apps now.
Chrome OS, which doesn’t go into general release until next year, relies entirely on web-based applications for basic productivity tasks like mail, document editing, photo sharing, social networking and reading news. Its inner workings are based on Google’s own Chrome browser.
To get around the connectivity problem inherent to web-based apps, Google says every Chrome OS laptop will ship with both wi-fi and cellular connections. The company has partnered with Verizon — when you buy a Chrome OS laptop, you get 100MB of free data per month for two years. There are no long-term contracts. If you want to upgrade, you only pay for what you need. Chrome OS users can buy a day pass from Verizon, or choose from a few long-term plans starting at $10 per month.
Acer and Samsung Chrome OS laptops will go on sale in mid-2011, with more OEMs to follow, the company says.
In the meantime, Google is launching a pilot program to get hardware running Chrome OS into developers’ hands. Early adopters can sign up to get a black, unbranded Chrome OS notebook, codenamed “Cr-48.”
Google VP of product management Sundar Pichai held one up during the event — it’s a full-sized laptop with a 12.1″ screen, an Intel Atom processor, a world-mode 3G radio, a flash memory drive, and it has a built-in “jailbreaking” mode so you can hack it. Google is also giving away a few of the pilot laptops to its Facebook fans.
From what we’ve seen so far, Chrome OS is extremely fast (the demo we saw was running on the Cr-48 laptop) and, provided you already have a Google account, it literally takes under a minute to get up and running.
Pichai, who has been using ChromeOS for six months, continuously gushed about its speed, which was evident during the demos.
“By building an experience based totally on the web, we’ve made all of the user experiences instant,” he said.
Microsoft’s PhotoSynth tool is jaw-droppingly awesome. But, because it’s a Microsoft project, the technology is unlikely to appear on some of your favorite non-Microsoft online apps, like Google Maps or Flickr.
However, our friends at ReadWriteWeb stumbled across a very similar tool — at least in terms of the end result — developed by the University of North Carolina in conjunction with Swiss university, ETH-Zurich.
The team has developed a method for creating 3D models by pulling in millions of photographs from Flickr and using some fancy algorithms to generate 3D models of local landmarks. Perhaps even more impressive the results can be generated using a single computer in under a day.
Project lead Jan-Michael Frahm touts the project’s efficiency saying, “our technique would be the equivalent of processing a stack of photos as high as the 828-meter Dubai Towers, using a single PC, versus the next best technique, which is the equivalent of processing a stack of photos 42 meters tall — as high as the ceiling of Notre Dame — using 62 PCs. This efficiency is essential if one is to fully utilize the billions of user-provided images continuously being uploaded to the internet.”
While the results are cool and would make an impressive addition to any number of geo-based services, more serious use cases include helping disaster workers get a better idea of where they’re headed and the extent of damage.
So far the researchers have released a movies demonstrating the technique on landmarks in both Rome (get it? built in a day…) and Berlin, and the results are impressive. For more information on how the process works, check out the UNC website.
YouTube has announced it will begin offering HTML5 videos in the WebM codec to web browsers that support it. So far YouTube says that it has encoded 30 percent of its videos in WebM, which accounts for 99 percent of all traffic to the site.
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