Google is taking its popular site YouTube to NYC’s Guggenheim Museum.  The search company will set up shop in the Guggenheim’s main atrium with all sorts of TV and video displays promoting the finalists from a recent promotion they ran.

The exhibition, set for October, will showcase videos from as many as 20 finalists of YouTube Play, a contest for graphic artists and users of Googles GOOG video site. A celebrity jury that includes Japanese pop artist Takashi Murakami and The Wrestler director Darren Aronofsky will wade through about 200 videos whittled down from thousands submitted in July.

The goal of this initiative is to try to re-position YouTube as a site/service that can cater to a more upscale, arts driven clientele and move it beyond the perception that its content is, er, lowbrow.

Interesting article about how keeping Facebook friends you have not spoken to in 25 years is a benefit to your real life social standing and social interactions.

A decades-old insight from a study of traditional social networks illuminates one of the most important aspects of today’s online social networking. In 1973, sociologist Mark Granovetter showed how the loose acquaintances, or “weak ties”, in our social network punch far above their weight in their influence over our behavior and choices (American Journal of Sociology, vol 78, p 1360). Granovetter found that a significant percentage of people get their jobs as a result of information provided by a weak tie. Subsequent studies have revealed that weak ties benefit our health and happiness. Granovetter suggested that this is because these friends-of-friends aren’t like you, yet they are likely to be similar enough in social outlook and personal interests to have a positive influence.

The article goes on to talk about how the explosion of everyone’s “loose network” of friends and acquaintances that are connected via social networks will create profound effects on social evolution. A study cited in the article from Cornell University stated that those who more frequently shared information online were more likely to be liked and to “win people over” in real life.

The most interesting element for me is how everyone’s ever expanding social network will prompt people to go to their network first for information, references, advice, support, and referrals. This is one of the main reasons why Google is so concerned about the ever and rapid influence of Facebook as a “go to” source of information over Google’s search engine.

All these social networks are a sociologist’s wet dream!

The interactive Google Pacman logo that celebrated the game’s 30th anniversary pretty much crushed productivity in the US on Friday.  Using some pretty straight forward calculations , its been estimated that a collective 4.82 million hours were waisted on Friday playing the game on Google’s homepage.  I’ve wasted two posts on the topic! Now get back to work!

Here is a really interesting take on Apple’s recent war on Adobe and their Flash platform by Charlie Stoss (whom I’m not at all familiar with, but has written a nice piece here).  His basic take is that the PC industry is in a death spiral (true), wireless broadband and the reality of SAAS/Cloud computing is here, and the companies that will be relevant in this new world order will be the ones that are able to control the delivery (sales) channel and sell the applications/software.  In order for Apple to be relevant today and in the future, they can not afford to support a cross platform solution like Flash.

Apple are trying desperately to force the growth of a new ecosystem — one that rivals the 26-year-old Macintosh environment — to maturity in five years flat. That’s the time scale in which they expect the cloud computing revolution to flatten the existing PC industry. Unless they can turn themselves into an entirely different kind of corporation by 2015 Apple is doomed to the same irrelevance as the rest of the PC industry — interchangable suppliers of commodity equipment assembled on a shoestring budget with negligable profit.

There is a massive steel cage death match going on in the tech world between Apple, Google, along with HP (now that it has Palm OS) and Microsoft.  Microsoft’s head is so “in the clouds” they are rapidly becoming the Sears of the technology world and on the fast track to being “Walmarted” by Google.  They won’t know what hit them until its too late (if that has not happened already).  From its very early years Apple has always been one to have tight controls over its ecosystem and we are starting to see Apple’s transformation from a PC maker to a platform developer.  They acquired Lala recently and just today, I received an email from them saying that they will be shutting their doors.  Why shut such a great service?  So Apple can seamlessly integrate it into iTunes, put all your music on the cloud, and turning a desktop app into software as a service that Apple can use to charge a monthly/annual fee.   Take this model and scale it to everything Apple does.  This is where it is going.  With all the rapid changes taking place around media, data, technology and how people consumer information, it will be very interesting to see how this all nets out.  The big wildcard in all of this?  Google and its Android/Chrome OS.

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HAPPY ST. PATRICK”S DAY!! Love the logo change over at Google!

…runs through Google.  On the official Google Blog today, a “pat on the back” post about the future of display advertising, and the integrations they have launched over the past two years since the acquisition of DoubleClick.  Yet another step towards ensuring that all significant online advertising will be run through either Google’s AdSense platform, or DoubleClick’s display platform.

I find it ironic that Google assails Apple for creating a “closed” platform when it comes to technology and applications via iPhone/iTunes, yet it is turning around and building just as closed, centralized a platform when it comes to online advertising.

So its been about a month in which I’ve owned my Motorola/Google/Verizon Droid phone. And I have to say that I am just loving this phone. But I don’t even think it can be called a phone, because the phone function is just one of many applications and features that the device runs. I’ve found the Android OS very easy and intuitive. The applications that I use are very well engineered and designed. There is deep and intuitive integration with social sites like Facebook and Twitter. When I first got the phone from Verizon, I didn’t have to deal with transferring information or setting up my contacts. I simply logged in with my Google Username and password and instantly, all my information was there ready to go. One of the slickest features is that whenever I see someone’s “icon”, I just long press on it and all the different ways I can connect with them slides into the screen – wether its email, IM, Facebook, or where their address is. Its pretty cool. And the Droid’s much publicized killer app is its GPS Navigation application. It is just fantastic and just as good as any TomTom, or Garmin product (Note to each of them: be afraid, be very afraid). The Navigation app is fully integrated with Google Maps and Google Street View. I’ve used it several times and I have been nothing short of impressed. Since its open source, I’m hoping some enterprising soul adds an app so you can choose different voices for the Navigation’s audio.

With all the positives, there are a few items that I’d love to see them address:

• With the Audio player, they should not allow two audio based applications to run at the same time. A few times I’ve had podcasts running and have hit music songs by accident and then had two things playing at once. If Podcasts are playing, you should not be able to play music and vice versa
• The camera could be improved a bit. And the button to take pictures is on the screen, not on the hardware itself. So if you are taking a photo and you can’t see the screen/button, its not the easiest thing in the world to do.
• Whenever I connect it to my computer, you always have to click on a button to enable it to sync with your machine. There should be a setting to just do that automatically.
• The Keyboard is just ok. It could be improved, especially with its alternate characters and numbers.

I’m not going to go out and call this an iPhone killer…yet. But the Droid does everything I need, its easy to use, and its on the Verizon Network where you can actually make phone calls. In fact, the other day I left my iPod at home by mistake and I did not miss it at all.

So yesterday I downloaded onto my wonderful new Googomotozion Android phone Google Goggles. No, its not an application to optimize drunken hookups. It is visual search. Basically, you fire up the application, take a photo with your phone’s camera, and Google will scan the photo and look up information on that item. I gave it a quick test run yesterday and I have to say I was blown away. But its Google, I would expect as much. I took a quick photo of my work Laptop, which is a Lenovo, and ran it through Goggles. Not only did it spit out information on lap top computers, it actually delivered results specific to Lenovo!! Impressive to say the least. So similar to the Barcode Scanning applications for Android and iPhone, this app has a wide variety of possibilities from commerce and product comparison, to just looking up something that you encounter in your travels. I look forward to trying this out on other things to see how it performs.

Three straight posts on Google, but they appear to be in product release mode these days.

I was adding a few appointments to Google Calendar this morning and saw that they have released some new and very slick features to their Calendar product. Now, when you set up an appointment, there is a mini calendar view that enables you to quickly, visually, see your calendar and what times you have available. You can then add the other people you want to invite to this view and see their availabilities, to find the best time that works for all people attending the event. It appears that the “attendee” has to have their calendar synced with Google Calendar in order for you to view their calendar, but this is ideal for Small Businesses or groups that are using Google Calendar and everyone in the organization uses the application. As you move the translucent “event preview” area (the blue striped area in the screen grab below), it changes from striped to a clear display depending on if there are any conflicts for the meeting time. Very slick. Here is a screen grab of it:

From Techcrunch, it appears that Google will be launching extensions for the Google Chrome browser.  I am a huge Firefox fan however from a web development perspective, Chrome is amazingly fast.  I can edit an area of my site and while it takes Firefox a few minutes for it to pull the update from the server, Chrome does it instantly.  Its a significant difference and much faster.  If the Extensions for Chrome as as good and useful as they are for Firefox, this could get very interesting.  Google is taking over the online world!

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Check this out. I got a direct mail piece from Google, offering me $100 coupon for AdSense. The poster child for the Internet and all things online and digital is using the old fashioned, dreadfully offline, less than 1% response rate channel of Direct Mail to drum up business. Oh, the irony.

One piece of feedback: I’d advise them to actually know the recipient’s name rather than addressing it to “Adsense Customer”.

Interesting. Google’s Tim Armstrong was named AOL CEO today. I guess there is still life over at AOL. This will be very interesting to see how this plays out not only at AOL but within the overall online advertising/portal marketplace.

This is a very interesting post about how Twitter search is dirupting Google from Silicon Alley Insider.

…time and time again disruptive business confuse adjacent innovation for disruptive innovation. They think they are still disrupting when they are just innovating on the same theme that they began with. As a consequence they miss the grass roots challenger — the real disruptor to their business. The company who is disrupting their business doesn’t look relevant to the billion dollar franchise, its often scrappy and unpolished, it looks like a sideline business, and often its business model is TBD. With the AOL story now unraveled — I now see search as fragmenting and Twitter search doing to Google what broadband did to AOL…

Obviously, Twitter is still in search of its business model, while Google is one of the most profitable companies in business. But the idea that something like Twitter could truly disrupt Google is a fascinating concept.