Discovered via @Philcr & @MsUkStudents

This seems like a brilliant spark of genius from someone at Google, I am sure even if you haven’t planned one yourself, most can appreciate that organising any kind of event on the scale and importance is quite a challenge!

Google have obviously picked up on this unique market and is now specifically targeting the D.I.Y Wedding planners with over 20 wedding templates for their Google Docs product enabling you to manage invitations, budgets as well as the numerous other tasks required.

One of the key benefits to using Google Docs is how flexible and easily manageable they are mostly due to the cloud based nature of the services. This makes it easy to update your wedding plans on the go and from anywhere keeping things easy to manage. Documents are of course easy to share with others too enabling everybody to stay up to day with exactly what colour of white the cake will be…

Google have also teamed up with a couple of others such as Michelle Rago, who is apparently a renowned wedding planner who also collaborated with Google in the creation of the designs. They are also running a competition to win $25,000 towards your dream wedding designed by Michelle Rago.

They have also partnered with the wedding blog StyleMePretty.com for experts wedding tips for each template.

YouTubeSocial.com is a nifty idea which solves the age old problem of sharing videos with friends online, and being able to follow it at the same time. This is a problem I can relate to a lot as I often find myself sharing a link and then struggling to watch it along with them and you end up spending most of you time checking what point each other is at in the video.

Initially I was slightly discouraged as the site seems to be fully flash which I tend to be slightly prejudice against as I generally take the view that if it can be done using JavaScript then it should be, although that’s a debate for another article.

Finding videos:

Finding videos in this is incredibly easy to use and works extremely well. Simply click “Find a Video” and search; videos are then displayed and clean and tidy format and just click the video to load it into the “YouTube Social” area to share with friends.

When sharing these videos with friends you can hold the “remote” and control exactly how and what your friends see, you can select the video pause, skip and change between videos which is shown to all your friends in real-time.

Sharing:

This site has really made sharing the links on Facebook very easy to do you can connect with Facebook and you chat/online contacts get loaded into the “friend dock” from there you can simple drag n drop the contacts and you are then given a message box with a pre-defined message to send to that person, this is sent via Facebook chat and provides a link for them to join in.

It also includes the general post to Facebook so you can share the link and tell everyone that you are hosting a “viewing party” for others to join in.

Irritatingly Twitter sharing isn’t yet possible however it does say that it’s coming soon. However I am not sure why it can’t be added right now as Twitter integration to post a simple status can easily be knocked out in a few minutes even if it is a simple link passing the status via the URL, it should be there.

The site also includes a basic chat for all users in the room, however it’s a very basic chat and has some privacy concerns if chatting with friends using it as there are no privacy controls for who can join your “viewing party”.

Irritations:

I don’t particularly like people coming to my parties unless I want them there so I’d very much like to see some kind of invite only option as well as the ability for the person with remote to give the boot to unwanted guests.

Legal Issues:

Unfortunately it seems YouTube/Google have taken issue with the use of their trademarks and are currently perusing SocialVision the company behind the site to remove the YouTube logo, find a new domain and give them the “YouTubeSocial.com” domain name.

While I understand YouTube’s view on this, however it is slightly disappointing from a users perspective as this is a great idea and something I’d like to see Google purchase and incorporate into YouTube itself or alternatively develop as a side project as with Google backing it can become a fantastic feature. Although it seems unlikely and no doubt because SocialVision is small they will eventually have to give into Googles will.

This is simply a post “for the lols” … Google isn’t sure if Google.com is what you want… What is?

I came across a very interesting page on YouTube the other day which provides some incredible statistics for you’re video speeds when using YouTube.

This provides some fantastically geeky data, you can see your average video speed over the past month (while using YouTube), compare your average to others in your location, country and the rest of the world.

Being on VirginMedia and with a respectable 20Mbit connection, I’m quite a bit above average. Aren’t I cool with my fast internetz?

Another great feature of this page is a “Test video” which shows you all of the connection information and speed while you watch a video, the video has many qualities from 320 right up to 720 and you can see some advanced details such as total Kbps transferring, and detailed frame information including how many frames were dropped.

Obviously this doesn’t serverany particular benefits other than an interesting insight into your connection and relationship speed wise with YouTube. Also to note, this is (obviously) based off your IP address, so if you are one of the unfortunate people with a dynamic IP address, or one which resets regularly this will represent minimal relevance to your actual usage.

Still worth a look, check it out at www.youtube.com/my_speed

So I noticed a shiny new feature the other day on YouTube, the ability to pop out the video or to “Watch this video in new window” on certain videos.

Now so far the only video I have come across using this feature is a 1:05:37 long talk from Vint Cerf  and amazingly, I have yet to find a bug… and there’s only 1 improvement i would like to see at the moment.

So on videos using the feature you see a little TV shaped square with an arrow pointing into the top right corner right next to the Turn Down the Lights button.

When you click this it pauses the video on the main page and loads the video in the pop-up as you can see below.

This seems to work pretty well and is a nice little idea, but it can be taken further, now i have been watching this hour long talk and i want to watch the video in a new window after 20 minutes and the pop-up opens and starts playing from the beginning, which isn’t a massive deal but it would be a lot easier if it resumed from where you were watching, like BBC iPlayer can.

Admittedly i am a little late posting this, all the hard core bloggers got this out on the day.

So yesturday someone at google made a “human error”…

Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs.

Okay i will explain a little, most people at some point or another when searching google came across a site which said this site is harmful and on click you are shown a google page telling you the following site may contain malware, well google works with StopBadware.org to keep this list of “badware” sites, but someone messed up when they were changing the location of said list and ended up with every site being marked as bad.

I wont go into masses of detail because I’m sure there are already a lot of blogs which have done the same, including the Google Blog i will stick some pingbacks and links to some good posts about it below…

Now i have a sort of mixed view on this, on one hand i think, hehe this is great it shows humans still work at google and it isn’t perfect, on the other i think… this is google for god sakes! how could this happen?! Although i am sure while it hasn’t been done publicly I’m sure the “human error” would have had a good telling off…

Okay, so as you can see my last post was a rather poorly worded rant because my post about YouTube turn down the lights feature was totally removed from google. But now its back… and its 3rd position!!

So yay… Thanks Google… still would like to know why it totally vanished for a day :s

Will hopefully be making video tomorrow for 5awg so watch it

Okay, I’m not happy.

I was. Now I’m not.

Google has removed ALL traces of my last post from their results, which is rather annoying as it was ranking nice and high for some good words, i was on the first page for the phrase “YouTube turn down the lights feature”, second page for “YouTube turn down the lights” and on both the 3rd result was a forum which was linking and discussing my post.

And now. Nothing.

Google why have you censored me?

Can anyone provide any kind of explanation as to why a page would be in google one day and totally removed the next? Even when i search dansgalaxy.co.uk for the term YouTube it shows every page with a faint mention but not a page i say YouTube about 30 times.

Have they really stooped as low as removing pages which state the facts about the  poor quality features which YouTube (their child company) is churning out?

I was just catching up on my YouTube subscriptions and stumbled across yet another, under tested (assuming it has undergone ANY testing) “feature”.

“Turn down the lights”

This only seems to show on the long videos, i noticed it on a 50 minute ofcom talk (don’t ask why, but i like to keep up with the media and communications sector).

I have to say, this seems to be the best example of simply little to no testing being done before things go live, and frankly it is totally unacceptable of a company/website like YouTube/Google.

YouTube and Google literally have hundreds and thousands of developers (its rumored it costs $1 MILLION a day just to feed them), and they are FAILING to produce decent features.

Okay so first off lets show how this looks on the page.

Exhibit A clearly shows the YouTube coders need to learn how to code.

Because the “Turn the lights down” button has bumped up the title of the video, leaving a lot of wasted white space around the top area. This is BASIC coding, and YouTube should not have this problem. End OF!

Also before any of the people who know I generally prefer to use IE7, this isn’t just IE… its FireFox too – not browser issue, it’s YouTube.

Just to prove my point slightly, i even went to the trouble of proving it can be done better.

Within 5 minutes (including the time it took to download and install the editor plugin) I had hacked about a bit and got them looking better. Obviously it can be done better. But it shouldn’t be done by me (at least not until I’m on the payroll!).

- Plugin used: http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/ -

Of course, i do seem to rant about YouTube and their handy little “features” and changes, but this ones really got me, and it gets worse.

So when you click the “Turn down the lights” button to adds a kind of lightbox effect to the area around the video and hides the sidebar and other boxes next to and below the video itself. (Note the fact that the “Promoted Videos” title is left floating mid-screen)

As you can see it seems YouTube tried to get fancy and be different by not just making the background fade but by adding gradient to the fade, so the top left hand corner is much darker and fades off into the bottom right, however frankly this looks crap, and a normal lightbox style would be much better.

Also why couldn’t they have some nice JS “move” the video into the center of the screen, and maybe enlarge it? I assume the idea of putting it only on long videos is they expect users to watch them, and want to make it easier and less distracting? Well surely a centered slightly enlarged version is much better than just hiding the sidebar which now leaves a HUGE empty void above and below the video!

You guessed it! It GETS WORSE!

Not only this but now when you hover over the “Turn up the lights” icon it totally destroys the gradient around the area of the pop-up.

And leaves it looking like like someone cut a chunk out the gradient and then refilled it with another gradient.

This kind of thing just really bugs the hell out of me, its terrible, its buggy, its crap, pointless, pathetic attempts and showing off what they can do and they have failed.

Maybe the credit crunch is to blame, everyone else is blaming everything on the “economic climate”… maybe Google/YouTube had to give the entire debugging team the sack as they running a little short on cash? After all a majority of Googles money comes from ads…

The worst part is you just know that this kind of thing would have been picked up in minutes if the people who developed this went to Bob in the next office and said mind taking a look at what i just done?

YouTube, you fail.

BETA TESTING IS WHAT YOU NEED! I will keep saying it until you start listening!