The UK Mobile Report

Google admits its video was too slow

Google exec Marissa Meyer has admitted what we all suspected: that if you want a web site to fly don't make it a fiddle. According to CNET she has just been speaking at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco and in not so many words admitted that YouTube beat Google Video hands down because it was instant. You went, you viewed, you went away. In contrast the Google offering employed various time delays.

Clearly there is a message for the mobile industry here when it comes to video. Keep it simple, keep it snappy and you will win. The race is now on to offer something that will be more compelling than YouTube on your mobile.

Google Custom Search - could do better

The new Google Custom Search (GCS) allows you to create your own search engine hybrid by letting you specify which sites you want your search to look at. It's a self created mini-Google if you like.

This sounds good I thought, and duly created a search focussing on UK newspapers and tech sites. It only takes a minute or so to set up, which is very good, but I was disappointed to find that when I used it to search current 'mobile' stories it delivered a rag bag of old stories. The first two were from May this year and the fourth was dated September 2000. What is Google playing at? Isn't it obvious that the default should be most recent first?

The other downside is that Google has decided to make the dividing line between ads and search results harder to see by dropping the light blue background from the ads that appear at the top of the page.

But GCS could become a powerful phenomenon if Google allows all created search engines to be shared in the same way as De.licio.us does with bookmarking. At the moment it does give the option for you to allow others to add sites to your site listing, but it is not clear if all search engines created will be shared. Maybe Google is worried about losing traffic from the main home page.

Google buys YouTube - And on the seventh day the Lord rested

Friday - An insider leaks the story. IT news sites salivate.

Saturday/Sunday - Frenzied dealmaking (something to do with appeasing big media interests whose copyright YouTube regularly infringes).

Monday - Google tells an excited media that the deal of the year has been done (Net historians will call it the Zenith of the Web 2.0 hubris, and the beginning of the second great dotcom crash).

Tuesday - A billion new users log into YouTube to see what all the fuss is about.

Wednesday - YouTube boss Chad Hurley rushes over to the Googleplex to beg for a $100m advance to buy a 'bit more bandwidth guys' while adding 'er...could we also borrow a couple of thousand of your networked PCs? Could we?'

Thursday - World breathes a sigh of relief as the people's TV is kept online after some very nifty cable switching.  China bans YouTube, followed by Iran, Saudia Arabia and The London Borough of Brent (ban later rescinded after protest from the Socialist Workers Party).

(Editor's Note: OK, this isn't strictly a mobile story  but seeing as YouTube is the repository for many current and possibly future UK Mobile Report videos we are more than a little concerned.)