YouTube

YouTube is the most popular site to visit for viewing online videos, sharing your favourite videos with people and commenting on videos you like. Recently YouTube was acquired by Google for a few billion dollars. Here is a collection of several YouTube third party tools which enhance your YouTube experience.

Download and Save YouTube Videos :

• Video Downloader - a firefox extension that allows you to download videos to your computer from YouTube and most video sites.
• YouTubeX - allows you to save and download YouTube videos easily using only your IE or firefox browser.
• TubeSock - grabs YouTube videos from the web and copies them to your video iPod, Mac, or PlayStation Portable.
• VideoDL - is a quick AJAX application that allows you to download online video into your computer. It supports top 3 video sites - YouTube, Google Video, and Break.com.
• Download YouTube via bookmarklets - A collection of Greasemonkey scripts and bookmarklets to do the job.
• Youtube-dl - is a small command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com. It requires the Python interpreter, version 2.4 or later.
• KeepVid - Download videos direct from most video sites like YouTube.
• YouTube Downloader - enter url and download YouTube videos.
• Youtube Downloader - freeware tool to download and save movies from Youtube.
• Youtube Grabber - is a free tool that downloads FLV files from youtube.
• GooTube FLV Retriever - enter the video page URL, download the youtube video.
• Capture Youtube and Google videos - save them as AVI files encoded in the MPEG4 format, using only one command.
• http://www.saveyoutube.com

YouTube third party tools :

• YouTube Userscripts - a collection of scripts to perform several tasks with YouTube.
• Youtube Video Slideshow - insert a username or a video tag below and it starts a slideshow.
• fTube - a YouTube player that downloads the list of 25 most recent videos featured on the YouTube front page. The user can select a video from the list and hit the play button to play it in-Flash.
• TubeCH - YouTube flash player.
• iTube - grab Youtube videos, then convert and import them into iTunes. Requires .Net framework and works exclusively on Windows.
• PodTube - a Mac OS X program, downloads, encodes, and adds YouTube videos to your iTunes library but requires Safari to fetch the videos.
• TvTube - For Mac users. Allows you to browse YouTube, Google Video and Yahoo Videos, for movie clips that people upload, choose your favorite clips and add them to your shared library.
• YouTube API - XML Feed Ripper - PHP script that taps into the YouTube API to deliver videos by tag, by username or what’s a current favorite.
• YouTube Widget - brings all of YouTubes videos to your Mac Dashboard.
• Search The Tube - A quick way to find videos for your website, blog or profile.

Top / Best YouTube Videos :

• PureVideo - collects top 10 videos from around the web
• The World Internet TV charts - tracks the most popular video clips from four leading Internet TV sites.
• Top YouTube Videos - a daily updated selection of the most popular videos from YouTube.
• Vidspedia - is a collection of the best Google and YouTube videos, submitted and rated by users.
• Youtube top-rated - a coverpop with the 1,001 top rated videos from YouTube updated every week.
• Best of YouTube - a blog selecting the best Youtube videos.

Google Purchases YouTube for $1.65B :

Google announced today that it would acquire YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock compensation. YouTube will continue to operate independently. Google Video will continue to operate separately.

The acquisition combines the largest and fastest-growing video-sharing community online with the largest search engine. YouTube, which was founded in December 2005, serves over 100 million videos per day via its progressive downloading technology. The site has captured 47.07 percent of the online video market, compared to Google's 11.09 percent. Google, meanwhile, holds about 50 percent of search market share, outstripping its closest rival, Yahoo, by about 25 percent.

The acquisition of YouTube gives Google a greater ability to capture more of the online video and social networking advertising market. Buying YouTube may also give Google a competitive edge against News Corp., which owns social networking site MySpace. MySpace currently owns about 20 percent of the video-sharing market, according to Hitwise.

According to Google executives and YouTube's co-founders, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, the two companies will work together to improve video search and advertising. The specific plans were vague, although there was repeated mention of new systems for audio fingerprinting and metadata search technology, and opportunities to tie videos into search results.

"It's difficult to say what we're going to be tackling first," said Chen.

"The thing that tipped us over was the vision," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt. "[YouTube founders] Chad and Steve remind me very much of Larry and Sergey when I first came to Google, and I say that in a fond way."

Schmidt and Google co-founder Sergey Brin said that beyond culture, Google was enticed by the "20-30 different ways" that Google and YouTube could work together.

"We spend a lot of time working on our two core areas of search and advertising," said Brin. "And when you think about search, when you want an explanation about something, what better way than to actually see it in video?"

When asked why they felt it was necessary to buy YouTube, given that Google has its own video product and video advertising outlets, Schmidt said that YouTube was the "clear winner on the social networking side of video."

Schmidt also said that Google Video would continue to operate normally. "Google Video isn't going away right away or ever, I hope that's clear," said Schmidt.

The two parties brushed off concerns over copyright issues, saying both companies worked with the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) and were responsive to content owners' concerns.

YouTube will continue to maintain its own brand identity and offices in San Bruno, Calif.

The number of Google shares to be issued in the transaction will be determined based on the 30-day average closing price two trading days prior to the completion of the acquisition. Both companies have approved the transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2006.

The all-stock deal was completed as such so that the acquisition would be tax-free for the YouTube shareholders, according to Google Vice President and Counsel David Drummond.

How would future gyms work/look like ? - An Idea

How would future gyms work/look like ? - An Idea

This is an interesting idea I found on net.

The difference here is that the machines would all be linked to a large central generator, so if you are really working out you will be generating much more energy than is needed to power the machine display.

The swipe cards would monitor how much time you spent on each machine then - depending on the efficiency of the machine - calculate whether you were a net user or contributor of energy to the building. At the end of the year, people get a rebate on their membership depending on how much energy their use of the treadmills and cardio machines has generated for the gym.