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The Google Apps Marketplace has launched a YouTube channel to promote its third-party partners. Less than a third of the vendors have posted videos to the YouTube channel. Google Apps is not rocket science but the idea of integrating third-party applications into Google Apps is a new concept for most customers. The YouTube channel will by no means make an app successful. But it does provide a channel to explain what the product does and how it fits with Google Apps Marketplace. And the video can be used in different channels, too, such as on a blog or Facebook. Sponsor So far, the YouTube channel includes 16 videos. Overall, 60 vendors are now part of the Google Apps Marketplace. Some of the videos are pretty professional, done in the Common Craft vein. But surprisingly, many are pretty mediocre, telling us little about the products and how they integrate with Google Apps Marketplace. Others tell too much about how the product works, not providing a clear value statement about the integration. Of the videos on the YouTube channel, Aviary is one of our favorites. Aviary is a service with tools to create graphics, edit images and do basic design. In smart fashion, Aviary then uses its blog to show how they used their own tools to produce the video. Jira Studios from Atassian is a service to manage software development projects. It's short and to the point, telling us why the service is a value to customers. The YouTube video from Concur Breeze is entertaining but it does not explain the product at all. Only in the last few seconds do we see someone doing their expenses online using the Concur product. On the contrary, Expensify gets right to the point. It's just 32 seconds. It looks like a video the founder made it with a USB microphone but that's okay. He gets to the point - fast. Mindmeister is mind mapping tool. They show the problem that comes when fleshing out ideas then go directly into a demo of how the product work and fits with Google Apps Marketplace. Drawloop has a complex product to explain but 2:42 is a bit too long for most people. Tell this story in less than 90 seconds and we think it could have a lot more value for the viewer. Conclusion The vendors that created videos for Google Apps Marketplace deserve some credit for at least taking advantage of the YouTube channel. But what is it about trying to be cute? Some of these videos are like advertisements. That can be fine and well for a blog or for an event but it seems like a lost opportunity for a YouTube channel on Google Apps Marketplace. Discuss
Excerpt from:
The Good and the Bad of a new YouTube Channel for Google Apps Marketplace
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YouTube comment threads aren't exactly known for offering highly intellectual discussions. Today, however, YouTube is introducing a new experiment that is meant to highlight the best comments on any video. This experiment will offer a "highlights view" of comments that shows the top rated comments and comments from the uploader at the top of every comment thread. Sponsor To opt-in to this experiment, just click here . More Updates This experiment also introduces a new way to view ratings. Just a few weeks ago, YouTube abandoned its star ratings in favor of a like/dislike system. In this new experiment, YouTube will now show exactly how many people likes and disliked a given video. Until now, any video you likes was also saved as a "favorite." Starting today, likes aren't automatically saved as favorites anymore. To round up today's updates, YouTube will also start to surface "Most Liked" videos in various places on the site. According to today's announcement, the YouTube team hopes that "'most liked' becomes a reliable signal that helps you find quality videos to watch." Fixing YouTube Comments: Is it Possible? As we noted earlier this year , the new watch pages feature a far more minimalist design than YouTube's current layout. With today's updates, however, YouTube isn't trying to tweak the site's design as much as the comment culture on the service. It'll be interesting to see if these tweaks will help to bring up the level of discussion on the site, or if giving this much prominence to the uploader's comments will actually reduce the overall number of comments people will post on YouTube. Discuss
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YouTube Tries to Fix Its Comments Problem
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YouTube may be one of the biggest success stories of the Web 2.0 era, but if you are hearing impaired, the site is only of limited value. Starting today, however, Google will begin to offer auto-captioning for all English-language videos on YouTube . Until now, only videos from a select number of YouTube's partners were captioned using the Google's automated speech-recognition software. Sponsor As Google notes, there will be over 700 million people who suffer from hearing impairment by 2015. As more and more content on the Web moves towards video , it's commendable to see that Google is working to make more of this content accessible to its users. Thanks to Google's translation technology, these captions can also be translated into over 50 different languages. It will surely take a while before this feature becomes available on all videos. After all, over 20 hours of video are now being uploaded to YouTube every minute. Whenever auto-captioning is available, however, you can simply click on the captions link underneath the video and turn the caption on. Google notes that its speech-recognition algorithms are obviously not perfect. If you spot a mistake in one of your own videos, however, you can easily download the captions and correct the error. Here are the current requirements for enabling auto-captioning on your YouTube videos: While we plan to broaden the feature to include more languages in the months to come, currently, auto-captioning is only for videos where English is spoken. Just like any speech recognition application, auto-captions require a clearly spoken audio track. Videos with background noise or a muffled voice can't be auto-captioned. President Obama's speech on the recent Chilean Earthquake is a good example of the kind of audio that works for auto-captions. Auto-captions aren't perfect and just like any other transcription, the owner of the video needs to check to make sure they're accurate. In other cases, the audio file may not be good enough to generate auto-captions. But please be patient -- our speech recognition technology gets better every day. Auto-captions should be available to everyone who's interested in using them. We're also working to provide auto-captions for all past user uploads that fit the above mentioned requirements. If you're having trouble enabling them for your video, please visit our Help Center: this article is for uploaders and this article is for viewers. Discuss
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YouTube Turns on Automatic Captioning for All Videos
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