Rob Zombie, YouTube Guest Editor

For Halloween, rocker Rob Zombie picked the featured videos for the homepage

NYTimes Movie Reviews: Hidden Gems

The New York Times has many nooks and crannies where small subversive elements hang out. My favorite is in the Arts section where the explanation of each movie's MPAA rating always contains a splash of editorial creativity.

From the review of Saw IV:

“Saw IV” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Imagine every conceivable form of torture, then add the inconceivable.

The Lobby: Year One

Back from Dave Hornik's inaugural The Lobby conference -- a gathering of ~150 entrepreneurs, VCs and media execs. Overall, a pretty stimulating and impressive group although I was nagged by some guilt given the boondoggle-esque location of Big Island Hawaii.

So how was it?

• Steve from Magnify.net has some interesting thoughts
• VC Mike has some briefer notes
• Valleywag has crossed to just plain silly

The conference itself was off the record, but a few things were clear.

1. Hornik and team did a very good job planning. No major gaffes, a few tweaks for next year.
2. People are mostly trusting and transparent. Folks were very forthcoming with their ideas, challenges and feedback. Emblematic of tech entrepreneurship in general or the curated and self-selecting group of Hornik's acquaintances? Probably both.
3. The request for our show size was not for custom Lobby sneakers but flip flops
4. I got to spend time with the founders from two of the more recent Google acquisitions. Both of them rock. They are among the best additions to the Goog in recent years. The challenge will always be can the large company be a place where the entrepreneur succeeds? It wasn't a great fit for Lars Perkins or Dennis Crowley. Did okay with Ev Williams for a few years. Seems to be fine for John Hanke.
   

My ask of Ex-Googlers

Sure there's people leaving Google these days for start-ups, angel investing, advisory boards, or just plain early retirement. It's natural - happens as companies grow. We're still retaining and recruiting smart folks.

I do have one ask of ex-Googlers - if you have the chance publicly, please celebrate your team, not just your personal accomplishments.

Huge shout out to my friend David Lee - formerly of Google business development, then Stumble Upon (for some time pre- and post-acquisition) and now spreading the seed funding love at Baseline.

When he left in April, VentureBeat said the following in a wrap-up of some google stuff: "the exit of video search expert David Lee, for StumbleUpon."

In the comments of this post, David chimed in himself: "Thx for the kind characterization in your post. I indeed left Google recently to StumbleUpon. That said, it’s probably an overstatement to say I was an “expert” - as my parents would attest, my name has never been associated w/that label. There are people at Google/Youtube who had - and continue to have - far greater impact than I. But I will print the current post as-is and send to my friends and family. Cheers, David"

Is that classy or what?

Feel free to shove this post in my face when i leave Google one day and claim to have invented all the products I worked on plus personally answered 72% of Google's search queries :)

The Google Super Mario Cubes

Steph Liu helps make YouTube Dev Ops run and she's also an awesome happy spirit. Proof? Check out how she and her team decked out their office to resemble classic Super Mario Bros levels.

Intensity 101

From the November Esquire article on Kobe Bryant:

"Studying the film, he noticed that his shots were rotating slightly to the right. To correct the flaw, Kobe went to the gym over the summer and made one hundred thousand shots. That's one hundred thousand made, not taken. He doesn't practice taking shots, he explains. He practices making them."

YouTube: CSI:NY episode based on Second Life

Geek Menage a Trois

Gadget porn of my friend Rob Curley's multiple devices. He carries a Treo, Blackberry and iPhone.

The weird story of Cowboys.com

So there's a large domain auction going on and cowboys.com apparently sold for $275k to someone from the Dallas Cowboys. Seems normal but then the guy withdrew his bid post-closing when he learned he was bidding $275 THOUSAND not just $275.

Of course, now the domain sold for $370k but how could the dallas cowboys not want that domain at a fairly reasonable price?

Well, it was two for one drink night

Boy, 6, Tries to Drive to Applebees

YouTube + Google Earth

Ok, i'll apologize for being such a homer here with all this YouTube stuff but you understand that Q4 is a short quarter so we gotta get all our releases out before the holidays :)

Today Google Earth launched an integrate layer which allows you to discover and play recently uploaded YouTube videos with geo-tag info. It's pretty cool - their blog entry has more info.

What's nice about this stuff is that there are 1,000 different ways to discovery videos - geo is just one of them - but there's no way YouTube.com can be all things to all people. So these alternate exploration paths "unlock" content by presenting it in different ways. Congrats to Brandon and the Earth team - thanks for being a great development partner.

Hope you enjoy!

YouTube: Second Life on TV? Is this real?

YouTube + AdSense = great together

Today we launched syndicated video from YouTube into our AdSense network with a three-way rev share. Whew, that's a mouthful. Maybe some of the press explains it better than i do. Anyway, this was something I piloted late last year and making sure it got launched was one of my early motivations for coming over to YouTube. Congrats to Nikhil, Christian, Aaron and the entire team.

YouTube: Toyota pwns WoW

Take my wife, please

I'm a sucker for old man Catskills humor:

Fitness guru Jack LaLanne on turning 93: "I'm feeling great, and I have sex almost every day. Almost on Monday, almost on Tuesday, almost on Wednesday ..."

FriendFeed, URLs and squatting

When some former Google colleagues launched FriendFeed this week I immediately signed up. Then I did what I always do when a new high-profile Internet service launches -- I checked if they registered the normal set of typos. One of my earliest gigs at Google was helping to build our AdSense for Domains business before the general internet (and investment) community really understood the power of direct navigation. So i'm pretty familiar with users and their traffic patterns. If you're going to build a large destination site, snapping up the following URLs is usually a good idea. It'll save you money later.

The destination URL
FriendFeed.com: Owned by Bret Taylor (FF founder), registered 2005

The usual suspects

• The Dot.Net variant
• FriendFeed.net: NO - Owned by someone in Arizona, created July 2007, redirects to a Google Apps iGoogle page
• note - .com extensions are much stronger than .net, you really don't get as much "oops, was that a .net or .com, but people often register the .net as a safeguard anyway
• The most common misspelling
  
• FrendFeed.com: YES - Owned by Bret Taylor, registered in Sept 2007 (must have been when they were getting serious about launching).
• other misspellings should be considered based upon how likely they are and the size of your audience, etc (see below)
  
• The WWW variant
  
• wwwFriendFeed.com: NO - Registered by a squatter in NY on Oct 1 - the same day FriendFeed launched (surprise!). Has a two-click ads implementation (where the landing page has categories, then you click to get PPC ads for that category). Look at their WhoIs entry. When your Technical Contact is "Legal Department" do you think that looks a little guilty?
• the www is a common typo. Free advice: register this for your trademark
• The Com.com variant
  
• friendfeedcom.com: NO - Another squatter. This one Romanian and registered on October 2. Two-click ads implementation.
• Same advice as above - the com.com is another common typo

For all these, the subsequent variations and misspellings then are just a function of how large the parent domain gets. For example if you get 100 hits a day to friendfeed.com, then frendfeedcom.com likely isn't getting any traffic. But take that to 1 millions hits a day, and you might see even a few hits going to very strange variants. All of this can be influenced by factors such as:

• the savvy of your audience (young/old, english speaking/foreign)
• feed vs bookmark vs type-in traffic for your site
  
• complexity of your domain name (coined word, generic noun, length, sound alike?, synonyms, etc)
  

Good luck to Bret and team! You may want to spend some of Fenton's $ to get those other domains before you get too big or just start your WIPO Domain Dispute now since they take a while.

The walled garden that should have been open

Update 1/3/12:
Since my platform post today was well-received, wanted to revisit an old question that I've never gotten a good answer to - why didn't eBay/Paypal tie their reputation system closer to their payment infrastructure.

Update II 1/3/12:

@hunterwalk Reid recommended this to them.Meg was not as sharp.
— Keith Rabois (@rabois) January 4, 2012

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Here's one I've wrestled with for several years: I wish someone would explain to me why eBay never opened their ratings system (which is still the most complete reputation database on the Internet). By keeping it closed they surely drove value to their auction business but imagine if it was the web standard for identity? A eBay ratings + Paypal combination basically means you have reputation+transaction bundled together.

Everywhere that payments occur, especially person-to-person, eBay could be entrenched. And where better to roll this out first than Craiglist (where they are of course a minority owner). Plus they could continue to capture higher than minimum transaction charges from their partner sites because they would be accelerating commerce by creating trust. What a competitive advantage!

But instead we still lack a global reputation db despite noble attempts from web startups.

Was it that some VP at eBay just couldn't make the call? Or am i missing a risk factor? Sure, an API would open it up to spam but signal detection and filtering can't be that hard - i mean surely no harder than Paypal's elite fraud detection?

One App Platform to Rule Them All

Somewhere someone is starting a single App framework API company with the idea that many of the smaller social networks won't have the ability to curry favor with developers. This single framework will look like today's widget companies but tie into an open standard for the "social graph." The smaller social networks will then join up and adopt this API in the face of MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, etc opening up in their own proprietary ways.

My guess is this exists already. Who? And do they have a shot?

Edit: Oh, we're doing it :-)

Go Bears!

As a Stanford alumnus I think I'm supposed to really despise Berkeley. But since my Farm experience was only as a graduate student, I guess it's okay for me to congratulate our cross bay rivals on launching a YouTube channel. For science geeks there's a ton of biology and physics videos. Internet nerds can grok SIMS 141 - a class devoted specifically to search engines.

YouTube on every screen

Nice BusinessWeek piece on our YouTube device distribution strategy.

"Everybody is talking about a YouTube Christmas," says Hunter Walk, YouTube product manager at Google. [i'll try to be more non-denominational in future interviews]