If you’ve ever attended a live event you know that one of the most essential functions while you’re there is to take photos of those perfect moments you catch with your own eyes.

While you’re watching a livestreamed event you’re left to using external screenshot software and it’s a clunky experience.

YouTube announced today that you’ll be able to watch a livestreamed event from the Sydney Opera House and use FRONTROW, an app created by VIVID, which lets you take “photos” and share them all of your social networks:

For the first time, audiences around the globe will be able to watch select performances live on YouTube, and share the experience through a custom camera application called FRONTROW.

During the livestream, not only can you sit back and enjoy the tunes of some renowned musicians, you can also participate right from your desktop! In a world first, you can take photos of the event through the FRONTROW camera app: zoom in and out to change your view, take photos during the live stream, apply filters and immediately share on your social networks.

Here’s a video demo of the new custom application created by VIVID:

I’d love to see this feature turn into an official YouTube one, however, it will be limited to streams using VIVID’s app.

There are quite a few options when it comes to the browser that you use to surf the Internet. You can pick from Firefox, Safari, IE, Opera, Chrome, and other smaller players that I’m probably missing. Much like mobile devices, the browser has become a powerful platform for developers to build apps on top of.

Google has actually done a fantastic job of highlighting extensions built on top of the Chrome browser in its “store”. I get sent quite a few Chrome extensions these days, but it’s difficult to write an entire piece about each one.

The best extensions serve a single purpose and are drop-dead simple to use. Here are 9 Chrome extensions that you should download and try right now:

Save to foursquare

This simple extension can be triggered from sites like TripAdvisor and Google. All you have to do is click the foursquare button that the extension installs, and it will save it to your “to-do list” within the app. This is the perfect way to use foursquare on the desktop efficiently for browsing to serve a better purpose for mobile later.

Sure, you could stick to browsing foursquare’s website to look for new restaurants, but that’s not a reality.

➤ Save to foursquare

FVD Video Downloader

You’re in the airport and you find a really cool video that you want to watch on the plane, which unfortunately doesn’t have WiFi. How can you easily grab the video and put it on your desktop? There are numerous ways to do this, but this particular Chrome extension makes it super simple.

You can also download flash games, music MP3 format, as well as MP4 or FLV video files in just one click. This baby has kept me entertained on many a flight and train rides.

➤ FVD Video Downloader

Writer

If you’re a blogger, writer, or just a simple note-taker, you probably know that getting the thoughts from your brain to the desktop can be a rough experience. There’s so much going on in blogging editors like WordPress and Tumblr, which distracts you from saying what you want to say.

Writer is a killer extension that gets you away from all of the noise and plops you into a very simple, and feature-free, writing environment that will help you focus on the task at hand. I use this one a lot.

➤ Writer

Pandora to Spotify Playlist Converter

When it comes to listening to music, I don’t stick to just one service. For a random radio-like experience, I tend to stick with Pandora. When I hear a song that I like, I click the thumbs-up button so I can remember the song later and help the service learn about what I like.

When I’m in an on-demand kind of mood, I like to use Spotify. This extension takes all of the things that I’ve liked on Pandora and turns them into playlists on Spotify. I can’t even begin to tell you how cool this is. Go give it a shot.

➤ Pandora to Spotify Playlist Converter

G+Twitter for Google Plus

If you’re using Google+ and don’t want top hop over to Twitter to check your stream, then this extension is for you.

With this extension, you can view your Twitter stream, Tweet, Retweet, and view conversations, all from within Google+. You can also share your Google+ posts on Twitter easily, which is one of its best features.

➤ G+Twitter for Google Plus

Magic Actions for YouTube

This extension kicks your YouTube video experience into hyperdrive. With features like auto-wide, auto-HD, and volume control with your mouse wheel, watching videos becomes a full lean-back experience.

It aims to make you feel like you’re in a movie theater and it does a pretty darn good job of it. This is a must-get for YouTube fans.

➤ Magic Actions for YouTube

Screen Capture (by Google)

One of the tasks that I do the most daily is take screenshots. When I’m reviewing a site or want to grab something really funny to share with a friend, I grab a screenshot.

There are cool desktop applications like Skitch that do a great job with this, but something like this extension makes it really easy to create a PNG file from a full-screen or region of the browser.

➤ Screen Capture (by Google)

Disconnect

Companies on the Web make money from showing us advertisements and directing us to content based on our “likes”. This is done mostly by tracking all of our actions on its sites. For some of us, that’s really creepy.

This extension blocks cookie and tracking requests on sites like Yahoo! and Google, giving you a running tally of everything that it has blocked for you. Turn this on for a day and surf the Web, it might scare the bejesus out of you.

➤ Disconnect

Scroll To Top Button

One of my favorite functions on the iPhone is tapping to jump up to the top of the page. It saves me so much time, I can’t even put it into words or numbers. Why don’t browsers have buttons just for this?

There’s nothing worse than reading a long article and then having to scroll all the way back up with your mouse or trackpad. This extension fixes that and will scroll up or down, allllll the way. Yay.

➤ Scroll To Top Button

There you have it, that should keep you busy for a while. Do you have any favorite Chrome or Firefox extensions? Let us know about them in comments!

In the tech space, we have a tendency to explain things by drawing comparisons to other services that you may already be aware of. You might be familiar with headlines such as “XXXX is the Airbnb for people who have iguanas”. While this can get annoying, it’s helpful for readers to be able to have an “aha” moment since they already know what Airbnb is.

Shoot, we were the first to refer to Viddy as the “Instagram for video” last April. But since then, things have happened and the “Instagram for video” monniker has taken on a whole different meaning, and we all know what that meaning is:

One Billion Dollars.

Yes, ever since Instagram sold to Facebook for a cool billion dollars, everyone and their mother has been writing articles about the “Instagram for video”. Here’s the first line from a recent WSJ piece titled “The Race: Build the Instagram of Video”:

Facebook Inc.’s $1 billion acquisition of photo-sharing start-up Instagram has shifted the spotlight to the newest phenomena in mobile apps: uploading personal videos from smartphones.

Talk about laziness. Most of these stories are centered around two companies: Socialcam and Viddy. Both companies have jumped in user numbers, mostly thanks to help from Facebook’s Open Graph, and both have investors that snag headlines. What everyone is missing though is the fact that calling anyone the “Instagram for video” is not only missing the point on what made Instagram so special, they’re slighting all of the hard work that Instagram did to get where it is now.

See, it’s easy to tell a story about two companies pitted against one another to grab some fictional crown and title. It’s not easy to talk about what’s really important: someone has to re-invent the way we create and consume video, and that’s a really hard problem to solve. It’s such a hard problem that none of the players in the space are even close to solving it right now. There’s another video service that you might have heard of, YouTube, that is in the driver’s seat right now.

What does “Instagram for video” really mean?

What it means right now for simple pageview purposes is “who will get a billion bucks next?”. However, what it really means is “who can become the app that is the de facto default for shooting and consuming video?”.

When Instagram was purchased by Facebook, I wrote a piece called “Instagram Just Became The YouTube of Photos” and tried to outline why Instagram was worth the money and stock that Facebook paid:

In just a little over two years, Instagram became the most popular way to take photos on a smartphone. Ever. This rise to glory reminds me of another company that became the default for a popular form of media, and that’s YouTube.

Instagram had found a way to become the “default” for many mobile photo takers. It wasn’t by accident though, as it took the company two years to get where it got. Instagram had many things working behind the scenes to become as huge as it did: marketing, solid community management, seamless scaling, almost zero downtime, celebrity appeal, and of course dedicated rabid users.

What Instagram did was rare, and Facebook knew that. It had usurped even Apple’s Camera app as the preferred method of sharing our moments in pictures.

You could even see a happy bias towards the app when people covered it, because it truly was changing the way we did things. Our own Courtney Boyd Myers wrote this in December, 2010:

In late November, I speculated that Instagram, my favorite iPhone photo app was creeping towards 1,000,000 users. Now, as reported by Nick Bilton of the New York Times, it’s official.

Do you see coverage of Viddy or Socialcam that includes such excitement? No, and that’s because neither company has changed the way we do things…yet. Video is a harder nut to crack than photos, which is why Google paid such a hefty price for YouTube way back when.

So today, I’m putting an end to this current “Instagram for video” nonsense, because we all know that it’s absolute bullshit tied to some figment of our imagination that yet another app will be bought by Facebook for a billion dollars simply because everyone is talking about it.

Instagram sold on merit. The real “Instagram for video” has a long way to go to even come close to deserving the title. In fact, let’s drop the title altogether and call it “the race to be best video app ever”.

In response to our piece about questionable viral tactics, video sharing app Socialcam has made some changes to the way that it displays YouTube videos on its website, as well as within your Facebook Newsfeed and Timeline.

I spoke to Socialcam’s CEO Michael Seibel today and he walked me through these changes, saying the company has “gone out of its way to make it clear that what content comes from YouTube”. While our original piece questioned the tactic of bringing in outside content at all, we’ll let you decide how you feel about it now.

Among the changes, the company has fixed the social sharing button, which would turn itself on when you visited a video via Socialcam on the web. Not only was this annoying, but it caused a stream of content to be shared, unknowingly by users, which of course benefited Socialcam by way of views and registration numbers.

The only catch is that when you turn social sharing off on the web, the settings within its iOS app will still show that it’s on, even though it’s not. There’s a UI fix for this that will that will be released in a future update, I’m told.

Additionally, Socialcam has added two small links that let you remove a video from your Timeline if you have social sharing turned on, or delete the app from your Facebook account completely:

These changes are great, even though the gray links could be highlighted a bit more.

Making things clearer for the users

Clearer labels for YouTube videos on the web:

When you visit a Socialcam video on the web, you’ll see the same social sharing toggle that you saw before, but the company has taken an added step by putting its current mode in the top right of the page. This helps users know exactly what mode they’re in, no matter where their eyes drift on the page. This is a healthy update and think it’s a better experience overall.

Additionally, Socialcam has added “powered by YouTube” graphics to the top of the embedded video, as well as along the right hand side where related videos are shown. Along with the “powered by” graphic, you’ll see that the user attached to the video is listed as “Top YouTube” so there’s no confusion as to where these videos came from:

Clearer Honest labels for YouTube videos on the Facebook:

The thing that really got the viral cycle going for Socialcam with these YouTube videos was how fast they spread on Facebook. When you watched a video, it would pop up in your friend’s Newsfeed and on your Timeline. The video was labeled with “recorded by Socialcam”, even though it obviously wasn’t. This was the tricky situation that really caused people to cry foul on what was going on.

Socialcam has cleaned up its act on this and is now labeling things as “shared with Socialcam” in the Newsfeed:

When you visit someone’s Timeline and hover over the video name, it is now clearly labeled as coming from YouTube:

These particular changes, although seemingly small, address the issues that we brought up about the potential for your friends to be confused as to whether this was user generated content through Socialcam, or simply old popular YouTube videos.

The moral of the story

The question that we asked in our original piece got us some interesting answers. We wanted to know just how far companies would go to be the next “billion dollar app”, and it seems that some will do just about anything to reach a proper “critical mass” to get attention from the press and appear to be huge.

In the case of Socialcam, which we pointed out was using a marketing service called FreeAppADay even though it’s not a free app, it certainly appears that some corners were initially cut by bringing in content from a source like YouTube. Whether those gaffes were made to deceive and inflate its numbers is for you to decide.

I’m told from a source that the FreeAppADay relationship is one that Socialcam didn’t pursue. In fact, the company offered Socialcam prominent placement and services for free. By pushing an app up the charts, especially one that’s in the press quite a bit, is a feather in FreeAppADay’s cap. I had pointed out that using marketing services like this wasn’t against any rules per se, it just didn’t make Socialcam’s growth look organic.

The moral of the story is that “social” is still in its infancy. Facebook’s Open Graph is still very young and people are trying to figure out how best to use it to benefit them.

At the end of the day, if something “feels dirty” then others will eventually pick up on it as “dirty” too. Faking things till you make it isn’t the way to go, no matter how much money is on the line. You’re only fooling yourself, and your users, if you think otherwise.

Imagine a situation in which you find out your favorite photo-sharing app, say Instagram, is full of content not shared by the folks using the service but rather being pulled in from sites like Flickr, uploaded to dummy accounts, and marked as “popular”.

In the case of social video sharing app Socialcam, which represents itself as a user generated content sharing app, that’s exactly what’s happening.

Background & Context

When a service climbs the charts and starts racking up impressive numbers, you usually have an idea as to why that happened. In the case of Instagram, we can go back over the past year and a half and follow its rise to glory. In Socialcam’s case, it seems to have come out of nowhere, hyped by the fact that everyone is now looking for the “Instagram of video”.

When we reported that Socialcam had hit the #1 free app position on Apple’s app store, I followed up quickly with the fact that the company was using a marketing service called FreeAppADay to drive itself up the charts. Whilst FreeAppADay is normally only used by paid apps going free for a day (SocialCam is free), this type of non-organic growth isn’t “illegal”, and Apple doesn’t seem to mind. Once you get into the top five on the charts, you start experiencing organic growth due to the curiosity of those watching the charts for new apps to download.

Once you have a lot of users inside of your app, it’s hard to keep them. One of the ways to do that is to make sure that there’s great content for them to find. For a user generated content app like Socialcam, you’d think that the content would come from its users. Unfortunately, that might not be the case here.

It appears that Socialcam is pulling in YouTube videos to its service and passing them off as content uploaded by its users. A quick hop over to its website, and you can see that most of the “trending” videos are pretty old videos that are popular on YouTube. Some of these videos show upwards of 6,000 Socialcam likes, which would surely equal many more social Open Graph actions on Facebook.

How it all works

The way I stumbled onto this is that to view a Socialcam video in your Facebook Newsfeed, you have to sign up for the app, and it’s safe to say that these non-app users account for some of those 36M. It’s a practice similar to that of social readers used by Washington Post and it’s pretty annoying.

I’m also an app user and have social sharing off, so none of my video views or comments end up my timeline. However, when I accessed a video through Socialcam’s site via Facebook, social sharing magically turned back on, thus sharing this in the Newsfeed of my friends:

As you can see, it clearly states that this video was uploaded to Socialcam. There’s only one problem, there’s no way to upload YouTube videos to Socialcam, as it only pulls videos from your iOS device’s camera roll or live from your camera.

If you were to click the football video, you would be asked to register, if you’re not already a user, and then you’d be sent to this Socialcam page with a YouTube embed:

Once you do that, it’s then plastered onto your Facebook Timeline and Newsfeed, and so on and so on. This type of manufactured virality was obviously well researched and tested, because it has clearly accelerated the growth of the service itself.

But the obviously weird part is that the video that Socialcam said was uploaded just a few days ago is over 2 years old, and even includes the exact same title as its YouTube counterpart (down to the lowercase i):

What does this mean?

I have a few questions about this, mostly centered around how YouTube content got onto the service in the first place. For an app that is supposedly about user generated content, surely that shouldn’t include old popular content from another service.

The mobile experience is quite similar, as you can see:

I am also wondering what other tactics that companies like Socialcam may be deploying to get the wheels churning and users registered at such a rapid pace.

After doing some more digging, I was able to find some other folks who are wondering how the app has kickstarted numbers as big as they have and how the YouTube videos got there.

I spoke to Socialcam’s CEO Michael Seibel and he told us that “In order to win the video creation space, we have to understand the video creation space” and that the company was focusing on the “consumption” part of the video experience.

An open question to you: If you tie all of this with the fact that the company is openly paying money to climb the charts on the App store, is the service as impressive as we thought, and secondarily, what other tactics might it be using? A piece by InsideFacebook recently cited Socialcam as becoming the most popular app on Facebook.

The ultimate question however is, if you could potentially sell your company for a billion dollars. What lengths would you go to find success?

Let us know what you think in the comments.

We let you know about the release of a new Google+ Hangout feature called “Hangouts on Air” which will allow anyone to broadcast a Hangout live as well as archive it on YouTube for later viewing.

This technology is super powerful, and apparently comes with a lot of responsibility if you choose to use it to start one of your own.

Just in case you don’t make it a practice to read the terms of service for your favorite sites and features, there are people who do. The Sociable noticed a change to the Google+ Policies and Principles under the heading of:

Google+ Hangouts On Air – additional terms

Here’s Google’s way of telling you that if you start a Hangout on Air then you are responsible for the contents of what happens during the broadcast when it’s live and when it’s archived afterwards.

You are responsible for all content included in a Hangout On Air which you initiate

You are responsible for ensuring all content included in a Hangout On Air initiated by you complies with this Agreement, including content provided by other participants who may join you in the Hangout. Please choose participants you wish to invite to this Hangout carefully, and if necessary use the blocking feature to stop someone else participating in your Hangout.

Google is offering you a trial of a feature that allows you to live stream Hangouts (the “Live Content”) through Google+ and YouTube. The Live Content will also be recorded and automatically uploaded to your YouTube account at the end of the Hangout for subsequent viewing (the “Archived Content”). The Archived Content will also immediately replace the live stream so than anyone you have shares the Live Content with will also be able to view the Archived Content.

By using Hangouts On Air (the “Service”) you accept and agree to be bound by the Google Terms of Service, the Google+ user content and conduct policy, the privacy policy, the YouTube terms of service, as well as these additional terms and conditions (the “Agreement”). It is important for you to read each of these documents, as they form a legal agreement between you and Google regarding your use of the Service

This sounds like fair warning that Google will hold you responsible for broadcasting copyrighted content, like a live sporting event or streamed music, and in the rare case of something worse….like porn. Even if you’re not the member of the conversation that is in the wrong, you will be held accountable as the “moderator” since you started the Hangout.

So be aware of who you invite to your broadcasted Hangouts, if they act like a moron they can get you into some pretty hot water.

When you want to share a video with a lot of people, YouTube is the top destination for most people. The service continues to draw top-notch talent to the platform as well, and continues to add more features for content creators.

One of the handiest YouTube features is the ability to add music to your video with its Audio Editing tool. The service has a library of music tracks to choose from, which you can use legally. If you decide to use your own music you risk the video being taken down for copyright violation.

Today, YouTube announced some changes to the Audio Editing tool, including an updated user interface to help you tweak the sound in your video to come out just right.

Here are a few of the updates introduced today:

- You asked for more tracks, and our library of songs now includes more than 150,000 tracks–and growing!
- You can now mix music into your video’s soundtrack at levels ranging from “soft background” to “completely replace.”
- Our “featured tracks” make it easy to find the best songs across genres for a variety of moods.
- We’ve revamped the Audio Editing user interface to make it easier to use. Here’s a look:

It seems like record labels are quite happy making deals with YouTube for its AudioSwap feature, since viewers are directed to a place where they can buy the song.

I still find that the audio for most YouTube videos suck pretty hard, which isn’t YouTube’s fault, so hopefully the service will add more robust audio editing features to cancel out unnecessary noise.

Here’s a look at the new design for Audio Editing, as well as how to swap out your crappy background sound for some better sounding tunes:

With all of the record breaking projects going on over at Kickstarter, it seems like everyone wants in on the crowdfunding action these days.

Since a lot of people are using YouTube to promote their projects and raise money, YouTube has announced today that it is now officially supporting the linking of annotation pages to both Kickstarter and Indiegogo projects.

Here’s what the YouTube team had to say about it today:

Over the past year, crowdsourced fundraising has exploded as great way to raise money for creative projects. We’ve seen lots of you using platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo to fund projects, and we want to make it easier for even more of you to use these tools. We’ve teamed up with these platforms so you can now link directly to project pages on Kickstarter or Indiegogo through annotations.

We’ve been inspired by creators who have funded projects through these platforms, like Freddie Wong’s Video Game High School and James Rolfe’s Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie, and we hope this helps many more of you launch the projects you’ve been dreaming about. To use the feature, go to your Video Manager, click “Edit” and select Annotations. You’ll see the following screen, with an option to link to any existing Kickstarter or Indiegogo project page

Up until now, video creators and project owners had to stick their Kickstarter and Indiegogo links into the description of the video, which is easily skipped over. With annotations, static text and links can be placed on top of the video, which is absolutely impossible to miss.

This is great news for those who are raising money for their awesome projects, as direct clicks from videos are a great way to raise more funds. It’s too bad that Kickstarter and Indiegogo can’t work out a direct deal with YouTube to embed widgets that allow you to participate by giving money right from the YouTube video page.

In fact, the embedding of anything outside of YouTube is a feature that is sorely missing. Imagine if you could donate to a charity or project of your choosing right from one of its promotional videos. Until then, the annotation feature will definitely do the job.

Mind. Blown. And I wasn’t even there.

That Tupac hologram made it look like Pac had came back from the dead just to perform at Coachella, it looked so real, omg.

— ☺~Biggie Smalls~☺(@ChantelleBREEZY) April 16, 2012

According to the folks over on Hacker News, the technology being used here called Musion Eyeliner. which is a modern version of an old illusion trick called Pepper’s Ghost. Wikipedia explains:

“The system works by placing thin metallised film across the front of the stage at angle of 45 degrees towards the audience; recessed below the screen is a bright image supplied by an LED screen or powerful projector. When viewed from the audience’s perspective, the reflected images appear to be on the stage.”

At any rate, it’s one of the coolest things we’ve seen in quite some time and it’s a great way to pay respect to the memory of an incredibly talented artist.

Liked that? You’ll love these:

Big red button, tiny village square, all drama

Think Google’s Project Glass is sci-fi? This developer hacked it together with existing parts

Snoop Dogg experiments with the future of print with smokable songbook

If you’re a music fan then you’ve definitely heard of the weekend concert extravaganza that is Coachella. Each year, it’s held in toasty Palm Springs, California and its host to the biggest acts in the music industry today.

This year is no different, as just some of the acts performing are; The Black Keys, Florence + The Machine, and my personal fav Gotye.

If you can’t make it to the event, have no fear, because YouTube will be livestreaming from the event starting tomorrow at 6:50pm ET, and will run throughout the entire weekend of musical performances. This is nothing new for the service, which is teaming up with Dell to stream summer concerts this year.

Here’s what the YouTube team had to say about it today:

One of the best line-ups in music? Three days of live concerts? In the desert? Say yes to Coachella 2012, coming to you all weekend on YouTube!

Since 2001, the the Coachella Music and Arts festival has brought thousands of fans to southern California to kick off the music festival season in style. For the second year, YouTube will be live streaming the action, with a three day broadcast of the festival, presented by State Farm.

We’re not sure if it’s the promise of a weekend in Palm Springs, but Coachella always manages to pull together one the most impressive and diverse festival line-ups. YouTube will be streaming more than 60 artists over the weekend, including The Black Keys, Swedish House Mafia, Miike Snow, Andrew Bird, Florence + The Machine, and one of this year’s biggest breakthrough acts, Gotye.

So there you have it, get your second monitor ready for some musical entertainment live from Palm Springs. Check out the Coachella channel on YouTube for the lineup:

Here’s a little teaser to get you pumped up and ready for the weekend: