Why Twitter Is A Huge Threat To YouTube

This is a great article by Jim Edwards and I agree with Borow on this one. This would be a huge blow to Google if this came to pass. With the IPO not doing so well this would be a large boost to the user community. Read the article below.

Google ought to be very afraid of the threat Twitter presents to YouTube, I was told recently over lunch with James Borow, CEO of SHIFT, a social media marketing company. (SHIFT is one of Twitter's early advertising partners, and its clients include American Express, Toyota and Walmart.)



This didn't make much sense to me.

I pointed out to Borow that Twitter doesn't host its own videos, and that YouTube doesn't allow people to tweet.

Perhaps he was confused.

But then Borow made this argument:

People use Twitter as their default "public" identity, especially in the media. Athletes, celebrities, and news anchors all ask you to follow them on Twitter, not on YouTube. (You can follow them on Facebook too, of course, but the minimalist nature of Twitter seems to make it a less risky place for sharing.) If you're a fan of Kay Perry or CNBC's Melissa Lee, it's a lot easier to wait for them to tweet stuff at you than to follow them anywhere else — YouTube or CNBC — where you'd have to repeatedly check for new postings.

Currently, YouTube is benefiting from this arrangement, because media people host their videos on YouTube and then tweet the link on Twitter. The two brands are symbiotic.

But recently, Twitter began stealing short-form video content from YouTube in the form of Vine, with its 6-second blasts. (Instagram is another threat to YouTube, with its 15-second grabs). If you want to show people a very short video, then YouTube is no longer the easiest or most obvious place to put it.

For this reason, Borow believes Twitter will begin hosting its own videos, of all lengths, simply because following a person on Twitter creates a "channel" for new video. YouTube has tried to create popular video channels in the past, but they haven't really caught on. Most people discover video on YouTube from links or embeds elsewhere on the web, or through search. YouTube, right now, is like a back-end video-serving database for user-facing channels like Facebook and Twitter.
"Twitter will be the main host of video content in the future," Borow believes.



The other advantage Twitter has over YouTube is an "identity layer." Twitter users are logged in. Twitter and its advertisers know who you are, and how to target you with relevant ads. On your phone, the ID is even stronger because Twitter users are logged in permanently. And you're giving away your phone number. Sure, you could look at Twitter without being logged in, but it doesn't work as well. In fact, Twitter has a good business in non-logged in traffic. More people see Twitter content from the "outside" as monthly unique visitors in the U.S. (62.6 million) than there are U.S. monthly active users of Twitter (about 50 million).

YouTube is 90% functional without the need to login, even though Google is trying to encourage more logins. So the identity part of YouTube is much weaker than Twitter.

So Twitter has a triple advantage over YouTube when it comes to video:
It's better at organizing it into channels.
It's better at publicizing it to fans.
And it's better at identifying those fans to advertisers.

"YouTube will be very, very scared" the day Twitter announces it can host all types of video, Borow believes. It won't happen soon, he cautions. Video hosting requires a big buildout of new servers. It's not easy. "It's a huge infrastructure cost. But eventually they will," Borow believes.

Twitter will also need to improve its search function, which right now is terrible. Search on YouTube and Google for video is very high quality.

So YouTube has some time to deal with the threat. But if it doesn't, Twitter will be there, stealing YouTube's business out from under it. "They become really pretty amazing" with video, Borow says.

New Twitter More Relevant Ads With Tailored Audiences

This could be a great boost for Twitter and I can see a nice ROI with this. With what their stock is

doing this is much needed.

Twitter writes in July we previewed a way to tailor ads for users and a way to drive better performance for our advertisers. After testing this for several months, today we are announcing the global availability of tailored audiences—a new way for advertisers to define your own groups of existing and potential customers, and connect with them on Twitter with relevant messages.

How does this work?

With tailored audiences you can reach users on Twitter who have shown interest in your brand or your category even away from Twitter. Let’s say a hotel brand wants to advertise a promotion on Twitter and they’d prefer to show their ad to travel enthusiasts who have recently visited their website. To get the special offer to those people who are also on Twitter, the hotel brand may share with us browser-related information (browser cookie ID) through an ads partner. We can then match that information to Twitter accounts in order to show the matched users a Promoted Tweet with the travel deal. The end result is a highly relevant and useful message for the user. Advertisers will continue to receive the same reports that include how many users saw or clicked on an ad, without identifying who saw it or clicked on it.



We have seen impressive results from those advertisers in our beta test using the tailored audiences program over several months’ time. Inbound marketing software platform HubSpotwas an early beta tester of tailored audiences. By reaching recent visitors to their web properties with Promoted Tweets, Hubspot saw a lift in engagement rates of 45% with tailored audience campaigns over their historical averages. Krossover, a technology company that analyzes game video for sports coaches, used tailored audiences to drive a 74% decrease in cost per customer acquisition (CPA). Enterprise app performance management companyNew Relic saw 195% higher conversion rates targeting their website visitors during the beta. We’re excited about the possibilities that tailored audiences will open up for marketers with direct response objectives.

Additionally, Delta Air Lines and their agency partner Digitas participated in the beta testing of tailored audiences. “We were pleased with the campaign’s initial performance and excited about the opportunities that the tailored audiences feature represents moving into 2014. The ability to hone in on a very specific audience segment, such as recent flight searchers or recent flight bookers, and continue a conversation with them while on the go and within the social space is a fairly unique and powerful offering,” said Breanne Loso, Media Planner for Digitas.

We’ve made it easy for you to get started with tailored audiences by partnering with leading technology companies that can help you create and transfer audiences to Twitter. Our ads partners who are helping bring this product to market are: Adara, AdRoll, BlueKai, Chango,DataXu, Dstillery, Lotame, Quantcast, ValueClick, and [x+1]. You may work with any of these approved partners, each of which has completed all of the technical integrations with us and has the knowledge to guide you through the set-up process.

Users have privacy choices

While we want to make our ads more useful through tailored audiences, we also want to provide simple and meaningful privacy choices to our users. Twitter users can simply uncheck the box next to “Promoted content” in their privacy settings, and Twitter will not match their account to information shared by our ads partners for tailoring ads. And because Twitter supports Do Not Track (DNT), Twitter will not receive browser-related information (a browser cookie ID) from our ads partners for tailoring ads if users have DNT enabled in their browser. Our Help Center has more information about these options.
Future possibilities

Targeting recent visitors to your website is just one way to use tailored audiences. We believe there are many other possibilities. Think of it as the way to define your own groups of existing and target customers, and connect with them on Twitter.

Botnet steals millions of user logins for Facebook, Google, Twitter.

Jeremy Kirk reports two million logins and passwords from services such as Facebook, Google and Twitter have been found on a Netherlands-based server, part of a large botnet using controller software nicknamed “Pony.”

Another company whose users’ login credentials showed up on the server was ADP, which specializes in payroll and human resources software, wrote Daniel Chechik, a security researcher with Trustwave’s SpiderLabs.

It’s expected that cybercriminals will go after main online services, but “payroll services accounts could actually have direct financial repercussions,” he wrote.

ADP moved $1.4 trillion in fiscal 2013 within the U.S., paying one in six workers in the country, according to its website.

Facebook had the most stolen credentials, at 318,121, followed by Yahoo at 59,549 and Google at 54,437. Other companies whose login credentials showed up on the command-and-control server included LinkedIn and two Russian social networking services, VKontakte and Odnoklassniki. The botnet also stole thousands of FTP, remote desktop and secure shell account details.

It wasn’t clear what kind of malware infected victims’ computers and sent the information to the command-and-control server.

Trustwave found the credentials after gaining access to an administrator control panel for the botnet. The source code for the control panel software, called “Pony,” was leaked at some point, Chechik wrote.

The server storing the credentials received the information from a single IP address in the Netherlands, which suggests the attackers are using a gateway or reverse proxy in between infected computers and the command-and-control server, he wrote.

”This technique of using a reverse proxy is commonly used by attackers in order to prevent the command-and-control server from being discovered and shut down—outgoing traffic from an infected machine only shows a connection to the proxy server, which is easily replaceable in case it is taken down,” Chechik wrote.

Information on the server indicated the captured login credentials may have come from as many as 102 countries, “indicating that the attack is fairly global,” he wrote.

Youtube makes a comment on the new integration with Google Plus

Since we launched the new comments experience on YouTube two weeks ago, we’ve received a lot of feedback from creators on the increase in comment spam. While the new system dealt with many spam issues that had plagued YouTube comments in the past, it also introduced new opportunities for abuse and shortly after the launch, we saw some users taking advantage of them.


We’ve worked hard to combat the increase in spammy comments and have made a number of updates, including:

Better recognition of bad links and impersonation attempts
Improved ASCII art detection
Changing how long comments are displayed


We know the spam issues made it hard to use the new system at first, and we’re excited to see more of you getting involved as we’ve fixed issues. New features like threaded conversations and formatted comments are coming to life, thanks to you and your fans.


So what's next? We're moving forward with more improvements to help you manage comments on your videos better. Bulk moderation has been a long standing creator request and we'll be releasing tools for that soon. At the same time, we’re also working on improving comment ranking and moderation of old-style comments.


Thanks for sticking with us.


Hopefully they will forgo this idea and move on. But with the real money coming from social network advertising I HIGHLY doubt they will.

Facebook Tweaks News Feed for More 'High Quality' Content

Just because you are Facebook friends with your old lab partner from high school doesn't mean you want to see his posts each day in your News Feed says Kurt Wagner of Mashable.com

The social network will soon allow users to "unfollow" friends whose comments and updates they want to remove from their News Feed, according to a Facebook spokesperson.


SEE ALSO: 20 Things Your Most Annoying Friends Do on Facebook

The new Unfollow button, which was first reported by TechCrunch, will work in the same way that users were able to "hide all" from friends in the past, simply with new phrasing. The idea is that users can block content they don't want to see from their friends without going so far as defriending them.

"The goal of this change is to help people curate their News Feed and see more of the content that they care about," a Facebook spokesperson wrote in a statement given to Mashable.

Users are not alerted when they have been unfollowed, so it's a relatively safe way to keep someone's posts out of your feed without them finding out.

This works well with exes, over-sharers and political hotheads.

Users can Hide All or Unfollow by clicking on the small drop-down arrow in the upper-right hand corner of any post in the News Feed. The change in language may simply be a way to more clearly state the options available to users. Other social sites like Twitter and Pinterest use terms like "follow" and "unfollow," so Facebook may be trying to standardize this language across all platforms.






Users will also be able to see who they are following when visiting individual friends' Facebook pages. Next to the "friends" icon on that user's cover photo will be a separate icon that allows you to follow or unfollow someone in your News Feed.

Facebook already allows users to follow others who they are not friends with, such as public figures and celebrities. This allows the follower to see any of the celebrity's public posts in his News Feed. The new Unfollow button is meant for a user's friends, meaning it won't impact Facebook's existing follow feature.

The Unfollow feature will be available to desktop users in the coming weeks and will available on iOS and Android in the coming months, according to a spokesperson.

Google Joins a Heavyweight Competition in Cloud Computing

Google already runs much of the digital lives of consumers through email, Internet searches and YouTube videos. Now it wants the corporations says Quentin Hardy of the New York Times.

The search giant has for years been evasive about its plans for a so-called public cloud of computers and data storage that is rented to individuals and businesses. On Tuesday, however, it will announce pricing, features and performance guarantees aimed at companies ranging from start-ups to multinationals.

It is the latest salvo in an escalating battle among some of the most influential companies in technology to control corporate and government computing through public clouds. That battle, which is expected to last years and cost the competitors billions of dollars annually in material and talent, already includes Microsoft, IBM and Amazon.

As businesses move from owning their own computers to renting data-crunching power and software over the Internet, this resource-rich foursome is making big promises about computing clouds. Supercomputing-based research, for example, won’t be limited to organizations that can afford supercomputers. And tech companies with a hot idea will be able to get big fast because they won’t have to build their own computer networks.

Take Snapchat, the photo-swapping service that recently turned down a multibillion-dollar takeover offer from Facebook. It processes 4,000 pictures a second on Google’s servers but is just two years old and has fewer than 30 employees. The company started out working with a Google service that helps young companies create applications and was chosen by Google to be an early customer of its cloud.

Working with Google has allowed Snapchat to avoid spending a lot to support its users. “I’ve never owned a computer server,” said Bobby Murphy, a co-founder and the chief technical officer of Snapchat.

That is a big shift from the days when, for young companies, knowing how to build a complex data center was just as important as creating a popular service.

“These things are incredibly fast — setting up new servers in a minute, when it used to take several weeks to order, install and test,” said Chris Gaun, an analyst with Gartner. “Finance, product research, crunching supercomputing data like genomic information can all happen faster.”

Amazon’s cloud, called Amazon Web Services, was arguably the pioneer of the public cloud and for now is the largest player. Amazon says its cloud has “hundreds of thousands” of customers. Though most of these are individuals and small businesses, it also counts big names like Netflix, which stopped building its own data centers in 2008 and was completely on Amazon’s cloud by 2012. All of Amazon’s services are run inside that cloud, too.

A more traditional consumer goods company, 3M, uses Microsoft’s public cloud, called Azure, to process images for 20,000 individuals and companies in 50 countries to analyze various product designs. Microsoft says Azure handles 100 petabytes of data a day, roughly 700 years of HD movies.

“People started out building things on Amazon’s service, but now there are a few big players,” said Mr. Murphy. “Hopefully the time between an idea and its implementation can get even quicker.”

Google is cutting prices for most of its services like online data storage and computer processing by 10 percent and its high-end data storage prices by 60 percent, while offering access to larger and more complex computing systems. Google is also guaranteeing that critical projects will remain working 99.95 percent of the time, far better performance than in most corporate data centers.

“People make a mistake thinking this is just a version of the computers on their desks, at a lower cost,” said Greg DeMichillie, director of Google’s public cloud platform. “This is lots of distributed computing intelligence, not just in computers and phones, but in cars, in thermometers, everywhere. The demand will only increase.”

Mr. DeMichillie, who came to Google from Amazon Web Services, allowed that Google was far slower than Amazon to get into the business. “I give them a lot of credit,” he said of Amazon, adding that in the long run he believes Google’s deep experience in data centers will help the company provide a stronger and more reliable service.

Google has a mixed record in similar efforts. The business version of Drive, its word processing, spreadsheet and storage service, was first introduced under a different name in 2007. It now has revenue of over $1 billion a year, but current and former executives have complained that it is a low priority inside the company because Google makes so much more money from consumer advertising.

But Google is one of the few companies that has the heft to compete with the others.

Over the last several years, each of the big cloud providers has built a global network of over a million computer servers. In the process, the companies are rethinking almost every step to maximize efficiency and power. Intel, the world’s largest semiconductor maker, now has six salespeople assigned full time to Amazon, feeding a continuous appetite for new computers.

Only a few other companies, mostly in China, are likely to manage either the capital or the expertise to build such systems, analysts say. Facebook, which does have a giant global computing network, so far has not shown interest in corporate computing.

IBM, which in July paid $2 billion to buy another cloud provider, will add 12 new facilities in 2014, eventually with 240,000 more servers around the globe, according to a senior IBM executive. It already has 25 such facilities. Hundreds of cloud-based services will be introduced, including cheap new communications systems and software for big, complex companies.

David Campbell, the chief technical officer of Microsoft’s cloud group, said he was often surprised by the growth of the clouds.

“It’s vastly different from anything anyone has done, a completely different beast,” he said.

And this shift is just beginning, maybe three years into a 10-year process that is democratizing heavy-duty processing power, Mr. Campbell said.

“Walmart did amazing things by running computers on its supply chain and analyzing customer demand,” said Mr. Campbell. “Now you can imagine some guy in a cabin in the Rocky Mountains producing that kind of thing for 500 or 1,000 retailers.”

The biggest promise of these clouds is their ability to make it easy to do things that would have cost millions of dollars in hardware just a few years ago.

That is, unless you want to build your own public cloud. Executives at all four public cloud competitors say there is no college course or professional training for running computers at this scale: The only real way to learn how to do it is by working at the handful of companies with the resources to pull it off.

“We’re giving people the same services we rely on to run Google,” said Mr. DeMichillie. “I wouldn’t say spending billions of dollars doesn’t matter, but there is a learning by doing in this, too; hard information problems we’ve tackled.”

Twitter halo fades after listing; Facebook, LinkedIn hold ground

After a big-bang listing, Twitter shares seem to be losing its fizz while social media rivals Facebook and LinkedIn are holding the fort amid portfolio churn by investors the Hindu reports.

In a dream debut, microblogging site Twitter’s stock popped up on NYSE debut on November 7, and closed with 73 per cent gain for investors who subscribed to its initial public offering price of $26 apiece.

The firm, which lets people post 140-character messages, raised $1.8 billion in a keenly watched IPO.

Skeptics were left speechless as the valuation of the firm, which is yet to make profit after 7 years of existence, soared to over $25 billion even as tech firms like Facebook and LinkedIn ended 2-4 per cent lower that day.

However, the momentum in Twitter shares seem to be falling already and analysts have begun to question the company’s current valuations vis-a-vis Facebook and LinkedIn, arguing on better margins and larger size for the two.

After closing at $44.90 on November 7, Twitter share price has failed to reach new highs and has entered December with a last traded price of $41.57 apiece — an over seven per cent drop from first day closing.

Along with a knock on share price, volumes have sharply dried up too. From 117 million shares traded on debut day, daily number of shares traded stand at about 6 million at present.

In contrast, the overall U.S. markets have inched up during this period as economic recovery picked up pace. Besides, Facebook and LinkedIn stocks have also begun to warm up.

Mark Zuckerberg-led social networking giant’s shares haven’t moved up from $47 levels on the day of Twitter’s fantastic debut but investors have not lost money in Facebook.

In fact, Facebook IPO investors are sitting on good profits since its listing in May, 2012 at around $38 levels.

“A multiple (of Twitter) that far above its peer group of 17.4 times leaves little to the imagination; there seems to us no upside (to price) scenario not already more than included in Twitter’s implied growth outlook...,” research firm Hudson Square said in a note to clients.

Professional online networking portal LinkedIn has already landed gains for investors if they bought its shares instead of Twitter on Day 1 of microblogging site’s listing.

From $211 apiece, LinkedIn now trades six per cent higher at $224.

It’s been a dream run for LinkedIn IPO investors after the issue hit markets in 2011. From $45 levels, the stock has more than quadrupled in less than 4 years.

Experts feel in the medium term, business-wise Facebook and LinkedIn are better-placed than Twitter.

“We expect Twitter’s average annual revenue per user to amount to $2.8 in 2013, which stands significantly below our expectation for Facebook and LinkedIn. While the figure for Facebook is expected to hit $6.5, the same for LinkedIn will reach $8.3. It is evident that Twitter has a long way to go in terms of monetising its platform,” analyst firm Trefis said in a report this month.