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.

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.

A week ago I’ve reported the end of ReadBurner. But as Alexander Marktl the founder of ReadBurner stated in the final post at ReadBurner’s blog, ReadBurner was for sale.

I honestly expected that some domain trader would buy it and load it with ads and popup’s but to my surprise Marktl sold to a group headed by Mashable’s Editor in Chief Adam Ostrow.

Marktl has made the official announcement just a few minutes ago and clarifies his choice in selling to this particular group:

After some email discussions and phone calls, I decided to go with Drew, Adam and Eric because they understand and like the concept of sharing items through Google Reader as much as I do. Moreover they obviously have the skills and the resources to build compelling web products.

Marktl also comments on the number of emails he received asking him to continue with this project, and that’s is why he’ll stay on board with ReadBurner holding an advisor status.

Adam Ostrow defines the next moves for ReadBurner on his post at Mashable announcing the acquisition.

The first step is to get ReadBurner back online, and we hope to do that within the next couple weeks. Alex – who is staying involved with the project in his free time - has some concerns about the scalability, so we’ll be addressing that before we re-launch. After that, the plan is to keep reaching out to all of the evangelists (see here, here, and here for a sampling) that ReadBurner was lucky enough to find in its first go-round and continue to improve the site based on their comments.

I’m happy with this move mainly because i liked ReadBurner clean and efficient style, RSSMeme wasn’t quite the same, maybe it’s just a design thing but what I’d really would like to see is the same kind of aggregation found in ReadBurner in FriendFeed.

We all make choices in life, and like the rest of the world I too make them everyday. I’ve chosen ReadBurner to browse shared news and the hottest buzz around the Internet.

ReadBurner was a simple aggregator service that gauged the popularity of shared items at Google Reader and displayed the top items in a simple and easy to use interface.

It was so good that soon after it’s launch several competitors appeared with the same model. ReadBurner was created and operated by Alexander Marktl who was trying to cope alone with the pressure of being the hottest thing around the net.

But sadly the pressure was too intense and the competition was gaining strength specially RSSMeme, which is also a one man show developed by Benjamin Golub.

This one on one battle for the top shared news aggregator reached it’s end today, when Marktl wrote the following announcement on ReadBurner home page:

I’m sorry to announce that ReadBurner is no longer available.
The reason is that I just don’t have time to keep the site up and running, because of some freelance projects that I cannot drop out.

I really want to thank all of you guys for supporting me, giving me feedback and visiting ReadBurner. It’s been very exiting to run a website that got so much Buzz from the blogosphere in such a short period of time.

If you are still interested in the idea of ReadBurner I suggest you to try out RSSmeme which is a very well done clone of ReadBurner developed by Benjamin Golub.

This annoys me, not only because i liked ReadBurner, but because i now have to change my bookmarks. What I’d like to know is when will Google itself release some kind of aggregator like these services?

404 is the dreaded http error code that plagues the Internet from it’s birth. If you just came online today for the first time, a 404 is a very simple way to let you know that you’ve made a mistake. All webservers implement this and will most likely display an error message saying that the page you’re trying to reach doesn’t exist.

In the early days of the Internet, web browsers where very basic and simple, and would display http error codes directly to the user. Most recent web browsers have fancy ways to let you know that you have fat fingers and will display a nice dialog offering you choices in what to do to get to the page you wanted.

Most recent webservers will let it’s admin configure a custom error page, that’s supposed to be more user friendly and informative, and this was the pinnacle of development in error pages.

This is the point at where Google enters the scene of the odd world of http error codes. Some Google labs engineer must have thought of using such dumb pages in a way to increase big G’s stream of cash, by slapping a custom page of their own onto users of Google toolbar.

Such custom page offers help to guide the lost web user by using Google web search, and thus showing some more ads.

There’s a big commotion about this all over the tech blogsphere. Users are fond of their error pages and become restless whenever someone tries to show them another version of the sad true, you’ve mad a typo.