It was a expected move by Google.
Youtube users which have a Google account will be asked if they want to link their Youtube account to their Google account on Youtube’s home page.

You can read more on how to link your Google account to your Youtube account by using this link.

Personally I think this was an obvious move and it was just a matter of time for the integration of Youtube into the the Google “Collective”. Resistance is futile indeed.

The image below was created using the new Google Trends Websites feature.
Until a couple days ago, to have such a chart i would have to pay for a Comscore report, or rely on Alexa’s data, which has been known to be quite unreliable.

Taking a quick pick at the chart, you’ll notice that Friendfeed is growing, and it’s growing fast having already gained more traction than Jaiku.
It surprised me that Pownce hasn’t been able to create any traction, despite being backed by digg founder Kevin Rose.

It’s been announced by German mobile operator T-Mobile, which is part of the Deutsche Telekom group, that they’ll be selling Iphone 3G for as low as 1 Euro.

Of course to get this cheap ass price you have to subscribe to data plan for a couple of years. Still it sounds like a business opportunity for german consumers.

I expect a flood of 100 US$ Iphone 3G being sold on ebay in late July, which is great if you know german.

You can read the full story developing on Reuters here.

In the late days of the Web 2.0 bubble there’s been a quest for a simple way to aggregate all social content and interactions.
It struck me that the frameworks for this are in place on the internet for over two decades now. They are Newsgroups and IRC.
Both technologies are free and quite stable, and have endured the test of time.
A couple of daemons and some API connections could easily integrate most web 2.0 sites into these old beasts.

It seems such a good idea that i’ll probably take a shot at creating something in this area my self. One thing that i’ve learned is that developing on top of new tech is a recipe for disaster and constant headache. If anything comes up, i’ll let you know soon.

Google is a billion dollar corporation that has become omnipresent on the web. It has become a synonym to search and it’s e-mail service has made web based e-mail a useful option.

We’re all familiar with the Google logo and the several oooo’s that are part of search results. You can read more about the evolution of Google’s logo at this Wired Magazine article.

Almost all recent web browsers come with a neat little thing that displays a icon right next to a website address. These are called favicons. It’s another opportunity for websites to distinguish themselves from others. Favicons are small and most people are used by now to see them as a visual representation of a website.

It’s in the human nature to associate images to objects, places and businesses. That’s why almost all companies have their own logo that’s created to portrait in some manner what the company offers. Like with any other image, humans store them easily inside their brains and the association between the logo and a company lasts a lifetime.

Changing a logo, breaks the association that’s been established in consumers brains and is not a decision to be made lightly. Rebranding has been studied by marketeers and academics for decades without any conclusive answers. But one thing we can all be sure of, humans have a built in resistance to change.

I’ve covered three different topics in this post, which aren’t apparently connected in any way, but most of you already know what I’m talking about. Google has changed it’s favicon.

Now there’s different favicons for the several different ways you can reach Google.

I’ll be honest, I hate the little G. It’s odd, it’s blue, and I just hate it.

Fortunately I’m not alone. After the official announcement at Google’s blog there’s been an huge uproar about this sudden change.

It’s been big enough to spawn the creation of a Greasemonkey script that replaces the old favicon back and which has been installed more than a thousand times in just six days.

If you don’t like the new favicon you can submit an idea for a new one to Google. All of the sudden it struck me, is this a crowd sourcing experience? Let’s create a new icon that people will hate just to see how many different suggestions we get? I’ve seen weirder stuff happening.

The new kid on the SMS sized blogging town is Plurk. It uses the tested and true recipe for web 2.0 success these days, tons of AJAX everywhere with a pastel color scheme and several messaging interfaces.

But one thing is sure, Plurk isn’t Twitter or Jaiku. Plurk is quite different in fact. What has struck most people is the beheaded dog logo. Which isn’t a logo at all, but only a status ranking badge.

Every plurk user has a karma rating, which is based on your activity and popularity on the site. The background logo is associated to the Karma state in which the user is. There are several ranks based on karma, only the lowest state, called the "state of creation" will display the headless dog.

Here are two pictures of other Karma states:

As of the time of this writing some Plurk functions are down due to the mass influx of people which was specially accelerated by Twitter being down again.

Another striking difference between Plurk and it’s competitors is it’s timeline. Instead of a good old vertical timeline we see a chronological side oriented timeline. I have some reserves on how will this work when users like Robert Scoble joins Plurk and starts adding everyone under the sky.

Plurk also relies on a action based action messaging. It reminds me of /me command in IRC or Twitstori. As I said a couple of days ago, the market is ready to see a new killer webapp on the social messaging/microblogging country.