Archive for January, 2010

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Social Media Marketing Blog: Google going interactive with YouTube Annotations

Monday, January 4th, 2010

Google wants to obtain a patent for a technology that can let its online video portal YouTube become an interactive gaming portal as well. They applied for the patent earlier in 2009.
 
The description of the patent is “Web-based System for Generation of Interactive Games Based on Digital Videos”. This patent details a system where the procedure of creating video annotations can be used for game like mechanics and video behavior change. The system can alter the appearance and even behavior of on-line videos. The system also provides for authentication based control over the annotation abilities that a user can acquire.

Now you may already be familiar with the YouTube video annotations as they are today. However they are fairly simple when you compare them to the patent they are applying for.  The new technology that Google wants to patent will allow users to create a game that can switch between different videos based on specific conditions such as different user responses etc. And users will also have the ability to control playback.

So if they win the patent, can you imagine what that will do to Google’s Youtube usage, not to mention advertisement revenue? And if they even charge a small subscription fee of $1 per application (like the one Apple charges for many of its ITouch apps), the sky’s the limit given the huge video game-loving audience out there.

 

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Social Media Marketing Blog: 2010 Social Media Predictions

Saturday, January 2nd, 2010

Happy New Year to you!

In December 2009, eMarketer released the fourth and last part of it's Business-to-Business (B2B) and On-Line Marketing Outlook series. The series primarily tries to predict the overall on-line marketing outlook for 2010. The predictions are provided by analysts Debra Aho Williamson and Paul Verna.

Here are two predictions from their 2009 fourth online marketing outlook.

Verna predicts that in 2010, twitter will grow into a serious web-based business from merely being an on-line phenomenon. He also predicts that Twitter will also make some money. It's a well known fact that despite tripling its user base in 2009, twitter hasn't made any money despite its the immense (??) popularity.

Williamson predicts that due to the growing integration of social media content with on-line search, social media will become important for businesses in 2010. She says that businesses will find new opportunities for advertising on social media sites and also warns of intensive scrutiny of such efforts by privacy pundits.

Now maybe I'm just darn good at this stuff. Or perhaps it's just simple logic that allows me to arrive at the same "predictions" as the above mentioned "industry experts".

I mean, wouldn't you as a business owner even be able to predict that eventually Twitter founders will monetize their baby (Twitter) one way or the other? They can't not know the power of handing greater than 6M users to advertisers on a platter. And of course social media will become important to businesses. How else can they get viral instant popularity if they have experts like us to help them market them online?

And finally, social networks are great for criminals who want to lurk and read up on every piece of personal detail shared by users. So of course privacy issues will continue to remain high on the minds of not just the site owners but also the people who want to advertise there.

So once again, Happy New Year! And look for more emarketer 2010 predictions (that are more interesting too) coming soon….
 

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