YouTube still claims to be the second largest search engine in the world. Just think about that for a minute. If you produce online video and it’s not on YouTube, you’re probably missing out on a great deal of potential viewers. If you’re not producing video at all, you’re missing out a lot of searches.

Do you consider YouTube important to search marketing? Let us know.

However, just uploading content to YouTube is not going to be enough. Like with any other form of search engine, content needs to be optimized to be found. At SXSW in Austin back in March, WebProNews spoke with Margaret Gould Stewart, who leads YouTube’s user experience team. She talked about some reasons a lot of content producers are missing out on some tremendous opportunities when they use the world’s most popular online video site.

"When you’re building a sustained audience, you have to continually create great content that connects with your audience," says Stewart. "I think the secondary part is understanding your audience – understanding who you want to reach, and proactively cultivating a relationship with the people in your audience. And on YouTube that means not just creating great content and uploading it to the site, but actively building your subscriber base, so that you can be in direct and regular interaction and conversation with those people."

"We find that video producers who are really active in the conversation, whether it’s comments or uploading ‘how this video was made’- you know, kind of the behind-the-scenes – people are really fascinated by that stuff, and we see some our most successful partners really having that, again, kind of ongoing conversation – not an arm’s length relationship to the audience, but very engaged," she adds.

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"We sometimes see content producers not investing enough time in attaching great meta data to their content, because like I said, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, and we all know that for Google, it’s important to think seriously about search engine optimization, because you can have the great content, and ideally the cream will float to the top, but there’s definitely things you can do to help yourself along, right?"

"Good clear, direct titling of your content, putting the right kinds of tags…because the fact is initially when content goes viral, people may discover it through search engines, or embed it in blogs, but then it reaches that really exciting word-of-mouth status, where I just may mention it to you person-to-person, and then what most people do is just go to YouTube.com and they search for it," she continues. "So if you’re not indexed well in the search engine because you haven’t attached great meta data to your content, you’re going to miss out on that audience."

"The other thing that is really important is enabling embedding," notes Stewart. "It’s probably the number one most important thing, because what we see in videos that become very popular, very quickly and take on that kind of life of its own, a lot of that initial traffic in the first 48 hours happens actually off-site."

Note: This actually plays to a point I made about Twitter embeds as well.

If you want more success from your online video endeavors, read 35 Ways to Improve Your Online Video Performance, and Tips For Ranking Higher On and With YouTube, which features an interview with YouTube Product Manager Matt Liu. If real-time, live video is your thing, check out 8 Tips for Real-Time Video Blogging.

By the way, YouTube is renting movies now, and while it’s not exactly taking over Netflix at this point, I would expect this to grow significantly and get more people spending more time at YouTube, where there is a YouTube search box very close by, and relevant related video suggestions served to viewers constantly.

Is YouTube a significant part of your marketing strategy? Comment here.

In its continued effort to custom tailor search results and suggest that what your searching for might actually be something else, Google has brought its similar page results onto the front page of your search results.

You’ve likely seen the feature we’re talking about before, but never clicked on it and now you won’t have to, as it will be included directly at the bottom of your first search results page.

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The feature follows along the lines of many other improvements the search engine has made recently, such as localizing its search suggestions list, adding search suggestions to Google Maps and even suggesting a suicide hotline number for select search phrases. While we’ve certainly taken some issue with Google’s personalization of search results, there are obvious benefits to the user experience as a whole. The difference here is that Google is not, it would seem, making these suggestions as a result of studying your surfing history and personal habits, but instead by analyzing linking structures.

Google offers an example of how this new feature could prove to be handy to its users:

For example, with the recent earthquakes around the world, many of us have been looking for international relief organizations. We knew that Direct Relief International has been actively involved in Haiti, so we started off by searching for [direct relief international]. The first result on the page linked us to the Direct Relief website, where we found many ways to help in Haiti. But what if one wants to support several organizations? If you click the “Similar” link that’s on the same line as the “www.directrelief.org/” URL, you’ll find other nonprofits that are also involved in relief efforts.

The feature seems to be rolling out in waves, so don’t worry if you don’t see it yet, it will be there soon.

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Virtualization is a star – at least in the big stage of the iPad. Since the device launched, Citrix Receiver has been one of the top ranked business apps in the store.

Chris Fleck, mobility leader on the Citrix team shares this demonstration showing a Citrix Receiver application enabled with four applications running side by side on iPad. He goes further to show the same apps running on a host of other devices.

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Born to Multitask

Citrix Receiver uses HDX, the name of the remoting technology Citrix has innovated based on the ICA Protocol (Independent Computing Architecture) the company has been developing on for over 15 years. Fleck tells us that HDX is conceptually similar to RDP/VNC but it includes significant optimizations for WAN performance, Multimedia, and user experience across multiple devices and OS’s.

Here is a clip from the demonstration video showing four side-by-side apps running on iPad. Citrix Receiver is able to zoom on in each application to make it full screen, or display all four simultaneously.

Many Apps – Many Devices

The demonstration continues showing each device in this picture, from Mac to PC, iPhone to Android, all running the same applications.

At one point, Fleck goes on to demonstrate how to “flick” multiple applications on the iPhone. This demonstrates one app showing full screen and the four other applications are swipable, like photos in your photo library. This seems like a natural extension of the iPhone and really could be useful for building larger enterprise applications or portals.

This demonstration reminded us of one thing, the apps matter. When we see an iPhone application on Android, or Windows 7, it still looks pleasing to navigate. Perhaps there is room in the enterprise for a Apple’s Mobile Human Interface Guidelines.

Enterprise designers, maybe it’s your time to build insanely great apps for the enterprise that follow patterns of the iPhone and iPad. Whether new, or old, Citrix Receiver is breathing life into applications and iPad is getting down to business.

The company plans to release this capability with its partner SoftwareFX at the Citrix Synergy event next month.

Virtualization could become a default way to connect iPad in the enterprise – at least in year one.

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After a busy couple of days, oneforty app store founder Laura Fitton is in the unique position as the unofficial spokesperson for a developer community turned upside down in the wake of the Tweetie acquisition and Promoted Tweets launch. As the company hosts its first Chirp developer conference, thousands of coders are questioning their role and ability to monetize on the microblogging platform. Always an optimist, Fitton and oneforty are intent on collecting and answering the many questions plaguing developers.

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The Tweetie acquisition in particular has sparked wild speculation from the blogosphere. For the first time since Twitter chose Bit.ly as its official link shortener, developers are reminded of the sobering fact that building on a single ecosystem can prove shortsighted.

When asked how third party application developers can mitigate the risk of being cannibalized, Fitton agrees that integrating applications into the broader real-time web (not just Twitter) is always a good idea. While she acknowledges her own product is marketed as a Twitter app store, a number of the featured services integrate with other platforms.

We asked Fitton how her community’s developers are responding. She answered, “Tensions always exist between platforms and the companies that build on them. Entrepreneurs have to realize that and be ready to pivot in the face of competitive forces they cannot master. But really, in what industry do startups NOT face competitive forces they cannot master?”

She makes the point that Twitter web clients have been competing with the Twitter.com browser client interface for almost as long as the community has existed.

Says Fitton, “It hasn’t been within Twitter’s core competency to utterly master the user experience, so the competition there might not be as one-sided as everyone thinks. The company has to realize that a diverse ecosystem is going to remain critically important to their growth. If a client monoculture forms and diverse use cases/engagement styles are not well served, user uptake and retention will eventually slow.”

That being said, if Twitter does choose to acquire more application services, Fitton’s recently launched Twitter Toolkits suddenly become even more useful than their initial consumer benefit statement. Fitton’s toolkits feature curated Twitter application lists from high profile tastemakers like Guy Kawasaki, Brian Solis and Steven Rubel. With web celebrities openly endorsing their favorite apps, Twitter and other potential investors get a glimpse of what lies beyond download and usage numbers. Investors see which applications have elite web celebrity advocates – these applications then more attractive for acquisition.

Acquisition candidate or not, ReadWriteWeb’s own Audrey Watters’ wrote a fantastic articleto help you assuage any fears you might have as a developer. As for Fitton, she’s already met with a group of 27 top third party application developers and carried the group’s concerns to Twitter platform lead Ryan Sarver. In the future she plans on expanding this group and formalizing the process in which oneforty carries developer needs to platform executives. If you’re a developer and you’ve got Twitter-related questions or comments, you can reach Laura Fitton by tweeting @pistachio with a brief note and link to any relevant blog posts or material.

Photo Credit: (cc) Kenneth Yeung – TheLetterTwo.com

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Today, another nine exhibits from the Viacom-YouTube were released, and while Google will no doubt get around to spinning the documents its own way, Viacom has already had a go.  The entertainment company highlighted four rather incriminating quotes this afternoon.

Here’s what may be the most damning one, attributed to a senior Google employee: "YouTube’s business model is completely sustained by pirated content."

Before Google acquired YouTube, Google employees also stated, "YouTube’s content is all free, and much of it is highly sought after pirated clips," and "we should beat YouTube by improving features and user experience, not being a ‘rogue enabler’ of content theft."

Then this final excerpt comes from a presentation sent to Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt: "We may be able to coax or force access to viral premium content . . .  Threaten a change in copyright policy . . . use threat to get standard deal sign-up."

If you feel like looking for more quotes of this nature – or seeking out ones that work in Google’s favor – well, good luck.  The nine documents total 232 pages, which helps illustrate how this has become a very expensive case for both Viacom and YouTube, with armies of lawyers involved.

Google has launched a very interesting new search option, with its Twitter archive. What this does is let users search for a topic, and look at all available tweets about that topic in chronological order. If you want to see tweets about President Obama for example, you can do so by going to any year, month, or day and seeing what was said about him on Twitter. Google can do this since it has access to Twitter’s info, which allows Google to index its real-time Twitter results. A Google spokesperson tells WebProNews it would be possible to do something similar with other sites through PuSH.

To me, while this is an interesting way of searching Twitter (in fact, I called it what Twtiter search should be), it gets even more interesting if you consider that Google is developing a system for sites to push content to Google in real-time, via PubSubHubbub (or PuSH). Google’s Matt Cutts spoke with WebProNews about potential PuSH integration recently (read about it more here):

Will Google make it an option to browse entire archives of sites in a similar fashion to what it is doing with Twitter? This could be a quite useful feature, and it would certainly fall along the lines of "organizing the world’s information." Let’s say I remember reading a New York Times article several months back that I’d like to reference in one of my own articles, but I can’t remember what it was called exactly, and I have a hard time finding it through a traditional web search. Being able to drill down into the archives in this way could make the search process much more helpful – a better user experience.

Of course most content sites have their own search features (sometimes even provided by Google), and you could try using that, but quite frankly these site search features aren’t always that great. In fact, they’re very often terrible. Google knows search, and it is still the most dominant search destination. It would make a ton of sense for such an option to be available.

I reached out to Google to see if this was a potential option. "The scenario described is indeed possible but we don’t have anything to announce today," a Google spokesperson tells me. To be clear, when he says "possible," he’s referring to the technology making such a scenario possible. As he said, there’s no announcement, and this may not even be on Google’s list of things to do. But, you never know. 

Google Labs already has a timeline feature for news.

Would you like to see Google offer timeline-like archives of site updates? Tell us what you think.

Sugar CRM is launching a new user interface as part of Sugar 6. It comes with a focus on what is becoming a prerequisite: an emphasis on speed, search and deeper integration with third party applications and mobile devices.

The speed issue is one that SaaS providers always seek to mitigate as they want the service to seem as responsive as if it were worked on the desktop.

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To do this, Sugar CRM is providing a revamped set up that when completed is supposed to be optimized for speed and designed for the experience that comes with using a social network.

It includes a new, global search, another effort to optimize the experience for the end user. Search is becoming increasingly critical as more data is available for integration with third party apps. Sugar CRM will strengthen its search with an open-source engine such as Lucene.

SugarCRM is paying close attention to the user experience, knowing it is a key to acceptance among users of CRM environments.

SugarCRM also includes native application support for the iPhone Android and the Blackberry. The company has also introduced a native app for the iPad.

Application integration is the hallmark of the emerging social CRM application. SugarCRM fits with LinkedIn, Hoovers and Jigsaw through its Cloud Connectors service, which connects third-party data service. SugarCRM also works with Sugar Plug-Ins for Microsoft Outlook, Word and Excel.

But can’t this all become a bit overwhelming? All this data flowing into one CRM environment means that the customer needs to think carefully how to organize, discover and share what comes into the network.

That’s why it makes sense that a search and potentially analytics component will become standards for services like SugarCRM. It’s also why SugarCRM has a certain advantage. Open-source platforms will thrive in the data deluge to come. Third-party services become critical as components that make sense of internal and external information.

It’s just a matter of how those applications are applied so customers can get relevant information that they need for the opportunity at hand.

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Google has rewritten its link unit matching system for AdSense. Link units in AdSense ads display a list of topics that are relevant to the content of the publisher’s page. When a user clicks a topic, Google shows a page of related ads. AdSense publishers can earn from valid user clicks on the ads on this resulting page.

"Many publishers have found that link units offer monetization similar to that of ad units and provide a more integrated user experience," says Jerry Krikheli, Engineering Manager for Link Units.

"The new system is much smarter: it not only uses more sophisticated topic ranking algorithms but also continuously optimizes by learning which topics have the most appeal to the visitors of your site," explains Krikheli. "The results are overwhelmingly positive — topic quality, user response rate to topics and ads, and monetization metrics have all improved in significant, measurable ways."

Google says link units are effective because they’re targeted to the interests of users. "Because users directly interact with the ad unit, they’re more likely to be interested in the ads they eventually see," the company says.

Do you use link unit ads?

Google has rewritten its link unit matching system for AdSense. Link units in AdSense ads display a list of topics that are relevant to the content of the publisher’s page. When a user clicks a topic, Google shows a page of related ads. AdSense publishers can earn from valid user clicks on the ads on this resulting page.

"Many publishers have found that link units offer monetization similar to that of ad units and provide a more integrated user experience," says Jerry Krikheli, Engineering Manager for Link Units.

"The new system is much smarter: it not only uses more sophisticated topic ranking algorithms but also continuously optimizes by learning which topics have the most appeal to the visitors of your site," explains Krikheli. "The results are overwhelmingly positive — topic quality, user response rate to topics and ads, and monetization metrics have all improved in significant, measurable ways."

Google says link units are effective because they’re targeted to the interests of users. "Because users directly interact with the ad unit, they’re more likely to be interested in the ads they eventually see," the company says.

Do you use link unit ads?

According to Smaato, a mobile ad optimization and advertising company, Internet users on Symbian phones, feature phones and Windows Mobile phones are far more likely to click on mobile ads than users on iPhones, Android phones, Palm devices and Blackberries. To get this data, Smaato, analyzed over 4 billion ad requests on 36 mobile ad networks. Worldwide, the click-through rate (CTR) for Android users declined markedly over the last two month. While Android still had an above-average CTR in January (just behind Symbian), Android ranked at the bottom of Smaato’s ranking for March.

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Android in South East Asia

While the worldwide CTR for Android is down, however, the CTR for Android phones in South East Asia is far higher than for any other platform. Sadly, Smaato only publishes a comparative index doesn’t release the actual click-through rates for all the ad networks it supports. Because of this, it isn’t clear if this just means that the CTR for all the other platforms in South East Asia simply dropped, or if the usage patterns for Android phones in countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines are very different from the worldwide average.

Who Clicks on Mobile Ads? Symbian and Feature Phone Users

Surprisingly, users with Web-enabled feature phones are far more likely to click on ads than those on most smartphone platforms, even though the user experience is likely to be far inferior to clicking on an ad on a smartphone.

According to Smaato’s analysis, Symbian users are more likely to click on ads while surfing the Web on their devices than users on any other platform. While we can only speculate as to why this is the case, chances are that this has more to do with the different user demographics than the actual user experience on these devices.

For more details from Smaato’s report, including fill rates for different ad networks and data from previous reports, head over the company’s website.

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Microsoft announced a new phone this morning called the Kin. It’s all about being social: putting the stream of updates from your friends on Facebook and Twitter at the center of the experience, dragging photos to share them on the web, etc. It’s a Zune phone, it will be on Verizon exclusively and no pricing information is available yet.

At first glance this looks like a lightweight device aimed at people who don’t want to pay for an iPhone and for whom apps are less important than a strong focus on social networking. That might have made sense a year ago when Microsoft bought Danger, the makers of the Sidekick and the system the Kin seems to be built on, but does it still make sense today? I don’t think so.

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Social networking is no longer the destination, it’s now the context. It’s the identity that people use to log-in to apps and share the results back to their friends. Mobile phones are about powerful, intriguing apps, these days. Analyst firm Piper Jaffray reported this morning, for example, that teen intent to purhase the iPhone has doubled over the last year to 31% – and that despite the cost. It’s because of the apps. The user experience plus huge store full of apps plus marketing make the Apple world very hard to beat on mobile.

Where are the apps for the Kin? There doesn’t appear to be any, other than the built-in features like automatic online backup of photos and the creation of a photo timeline.

It’s important to give people access to Facebook, Twitter and MySpace – but is that really enough anymore? I’d argue that it’s not. The Apple app store has so caught the imagination of so many people, that’s where the action and excitement are on mobile. Perhaps that’s just among the slightly more geeky though, perhaps a low-cost Facebook phone will win the hearts of millions.

Six months ago the Palm Pixi was mentioned as a low-cost app-savvy mobile phone that could increase youth use of smartphones, but it doesn’t appear that that’s happened. Many young people buy feature phones and supplement them with iPod Touches – for the apps. That still sounds like the smartest move for the young people being targeted by the Kin. That way you get the apps you want without a monthly data plan.

Maybe the Kin will have a strong mobile browser and support the growth of a non-native, web based app ecosystem. That’s not the way it’s being framed, though.

What do you think, do you think a social phone is sufficiently compelling for users?

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The long-closed nature of Apple’s iPhone OS ecosystem is coming to a head with the addition of major new restrictions on developers. If there ever was a time when the Android world had a chance to out-innovate Apple, this could be it.

Each day this week, developers have pointed out another indignity Apple’s legal framework subjects them to. Could this be the pressure that gets resolved by the rise of a compelling Android offering? It seems like a long shot.

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People creating applications on the iPhone and iPad platform are apparently no longer allowed to build in development environments abstracted from the preferred form of code, 3rd party analytics services are believed to be no longer allowed to track use of apps, Apple has baked in its own advertising platform and the essential requirement of winning Apple’s permission to deploy apps on its platform is feeling more onerous every day.  

At the same time, no one else has come close to building a User Experience that can rival the iPhone and iPad.  If someone could, a grand battle could emerge.  Instead, right now it’s looking ugly. On the positive side, the number of Android applications is growing faster and faster.

The Anguish

Prominant iPhone developer Dan Grigsby articulated today what could become an increasingly common sentiment in a goodbye post announcing the closure of his popular iPhone development blog Mobile Orchard:

Ask permission environments crush creativity and innovation. In healthy environments, when would-be innovators/creators identify opportunities the only thing that stands between the idea and its realization is work. In the iPhone OS environment when you see an opportunity, you put in work first, ask Apple’s permission and then, only after gaining their approval, your idea can be realized.

I’ve always worked at the edge; it’s where the interesting opportunities live. None of the startup I’ve created would have been possible in an ask permission environment…. I won’t work in this ask-permission environment any longer.

As Google’s Chris Messina put it well in some poignant speculation this afternoon, “It occurs to me that Apple is crossing a chasm. To where, I don’t know. But its early proponents seem to be being left behind.”

Another Perspective: Despite Its Problems, Apple’s Ecosystem Remains the Best

Raven Zachary, President of leading iPhone development shop Small Society, offers another perspective.

Android needs a better OS before we’d even begin to see iPhone developers leave. I didn’t fall in love with iPhone OS due to the elegance of Apple’s legal terms. It’s the platform that I fell in love with. It’s the best mobile platform out there, and while I appreciate the analysis by the community and the hard questions being asked, I remain committed to the iPhone platform.

Of course the most probable outcome of all this is that most developers will stay where the users, the money and the best user experience are. Some will be unhappy and some will leave – but probably not enough for consumers to notice.

If only someone could build an Android device that rivaled Apple’s hardware, and if the issues with different versions of Android across devices could be fixed, if the Android OS was just betteer – then there would be an incredible opportunity to lure away developers and finally get more users drawn to their applications. The iPad is really incredible though and there are a whole lot of very big “ifs” in play.

An effective challenge by Android sure feels like a long-shot right now, doesn’t it?

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Website owners and bloggers, take heed: you don’t need to stop whatever you’re doing and eliminate all tools, videos, and pictures from your properties.  But as soon as it’s convenient, you may want to (re)check how quickly things load, because Google announced this afternoon that it’s begun to factor site speed into its search rankings.

We hope this development hasn’t caught anyone by surprise; without citing specific dates, Google’s been talking about it for quite some time.  Also, in a new official blog post, Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts pointed out that site speed is perhaps something everyone should have been paying attention to all along.

Then here’s one more piece of info: according to Singhal and Cutts, this change was actually implemented "a few weeks back."  Sneaky.

Anyway, the pair of Googlers explained on the Webmaster Central Blog, "Speeding up websites is important – not just to site owners, but to all Internet users.  Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there.  But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs."

So if you want to pursue this matter, here are some free, Google-approved tools for checking site speed: PageSpeed, YSlow, and WebPagetest.  Plus, there’s a site performance lab among the other Webmaster Tools, and code.google.com/speed offers even more options.

We’ll say one more time, though: this doesn’t require anyone’s immediate attention.  Singhal and Cutts wrote, "While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page.  Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point."

Rackspace launched an iPad app to manage a cloud infrastructure, one of the first to offer such a service.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) does not have apps for the iPhone nor the iPad platforms. It has historically not offered mobile apps for AWS.

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You can still access AWS on the iPad through the Safari browser. But is the experience as rich as what you would have as on a native app?

Mike Mayo built Rackspace’s iPad app. He says it is the functionality that gives apps their value. It’s evident in both consumer and enterprise apps. Users get a rich user experience. You can see it in the Racskpace cloud app.

Mayo humorously says that the app offers administrators “a life.” Meaning that you can go out for dinner without the anxiety of not knowing how the infrastructure is faring. If you see a problem, you can reboot, directly from the device.

The app does have a new service not available on the iPhone version. You can delete your servers on it. Mayo kept the feature off the iPhone due to the concern that it’s such a small device, easily left at a bar or restaurant. He feels people are less likely to leave an iPad due to its size. We’re not so sure. People leave their laptops behind all the time.

We could go into details about the app and what it offers but Robert Scoble’s video does a good job of that.

Mayo is currently developing a Rackpace cloud app for the Android.

Disclosure: RackSpace is a sponsor of ReadWriteCloud’s parent site, ReadWriteWeb.

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