Longer Videos, Google Weather, Facebook Questions… Oh MY!


Image Source: Google Earth Weather

Time for another Weekly Recap! Pretty spread out this week. No major trends but everyone seems to be plugging away with some new features and trying out some new things. I also added a link to some results from the viral Old Spice video campaign so that you don’t think I have forgotten about topics we talk about in the past.

Here is what I saw happen on the web this week:

YouTube Videos extended to 15 minutes, well except for Russians – This week, YouTube announced that they are increasing the length of YouTube videos to 15 minutes. You used to be able to only have videos 10 minutes long. My first impression was that I didn’t think this was necessary. I haven’t watched a YouTube video and thought, man I wish that was longer. Most YouTube videos are already longer than they need to be. After I thought about it some more, I considered how much online video is competing with television viewing and I bet the extra 5 minutes will be huge for ‘webisodes’. Of course none of this matters at all if you are in Russia, since YouTube has been banned in Russia for having a ‘racist’ video.

Google does the weather and checks in – Google had a few big announcements this week (as usual). One was that now with Google Earth you can get real time weather in the locations you are looking for. So all you wanna-be meteorologists can nerd out to some real time weather! They also mentioned that developers are working on a check-in system like Foursquare and Gowalla.

Facebook rolls out Questions – Have you ever used LinkedIn Answers? Well Facebook is currently rolling out a similar function, called Questions, so that you can ask your Facebook friends for help or their opinion. This could be a great opportunity for businesses if Questions adds hyperlinks in people’s answers or lets you link to their Faceboook fan page, if they have one.

Old Spice sees success from viral campaign – Whether you loved them or hated them, everyone wanted to know if the Old Spice viral videos did anything to move their bottom line. Looks like it did. This is great news to those desperate to tie social media to ROI.

Links I Liked This Week:

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