We first did this list in August 2007, at which point Evolution of Dance by comedian Judson Laipply was number 1 with nearly 56 million views (it's now outside the top 10). The next update was September 2008, when Avril Lavigne's Girlfriend pop music video was number 1 with 103 million views. In January 2010, Charlie bit my finger - again ! was number 1, with 148 million views. By the beginning of January 2011, Justin Bieber was at number 1 with over 400 million views for Baby.

Here is the top 10, as of February 2012:

2. Jennifer Lopez - On The Floor ft. Pitbull; 463,245,100 views

3. Lady Gaga - Bad Romance; 438,181,560 views

4. Shakira - Waka Waka(This Time for Africa); 435,406,537 views

5. Eminem - Love The Way You Lie ft. Rihanna; 419,238,359 views

6. Charlie bit my finger - again !; 403,885,492 views

7. LMFAO - Party Rock Anthem ft. Lauren Bennett, GoonRock; 338,476,990 views

8. Parto in un letto; 324,131,517 views

9. Eminem - Not Afraid; 305,724,343 views

10. Justin Bieber - Never Say Never ft. Jaden Smith; 290,917,758 views

We've compared Showyou's previous versions to Flipboard and Instapaper, which is pretty esteemed company for an iOS app. As a set of features, those comparisons are apt. But the interface takes it a step further. The app takes full advantage of the touchscreen. It's a better interface than TV has ever had. And you don't just watch on your device; you can AirPlay it to your Apple TV and just use Showyou as the remote. Whatever it was about TV that Steve Jobs said he "finally cracked," it was probably something like this.

Showyou has this figured out in so many ways. No other app has this grid interface, for one thing. The main screen of all your videos flows under your fingers like Microsoft's Surface or something out of Minority Report, except this is something you can have right now.

When you go further in to the app, whether you're browsing a category or a friend's videos, the interface is reined in a little, going to a simpler, scrolling column. The new navigation drawer helps you get reoriented quickly and easily.

The sources of the videos in Showyou are your friends and the people you follow. It connects to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, Vimeo and Vodpod, which is a video curation site by Remixation, the company that makes Showyou. There are also some publisher channels, like The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, TED and more. The main grid shows videos from all the sources you're following, and you can narrow down by source, by topic or hashtag, or by the person sharing. It even has pretty fast search using all that social metadata, with an index of nearly 30 million videos so far.

Showyou is free, and it will become ad-supported as it grows. It's also considering a subscription service for certain shows or publishers. The big question is whether Showyou will get licenses for major TV shows or movies. "Not yet," its people say. "Maybe soon." But YouTube viewing is eclipsing TV, anyway. For iPad or Kindle Fire owners, or even for iPhone and iPod Touch, Showyou should be in your living room.

Rawporter, an iPhone app that will soon be rolled out for Android, turns almost anyone into a local news cameraman or camerawoman. Instead of dispatching a camera crew to a fire during rush hour and risk they won't get there until after the flame is out, a television news reporter can create an assignment from Rawporter's Web interface and send it to anyone with the app who may be in the area of the fire.

Speaking at Columbia University's social media weekend in New York on Saturday, Rawporter co-founder Rob Gaige said the assignment feature allows producers to tell photographers how much they'll be paid. Photo and video journalists retain rights to the work they create using the app and can share it with their followers on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.

"Our job is to make your job easier," Gaige told conference attendees, most of whom were journalists, and many of whom were not buying assertions that Rawporter would not threaten their already tenuous job security.

Even an instructional video on Rawporter's Web site notes that traditional news crews are "too costly and too slow for today's news market" and that viewers don't want to see "a reporter talking about the aftermath" when they can watch an event as it unfolds.

The app itself is relatively straightforward to use.It feels a lot like Instagram, except it also offers push notifications from news outlets looking for content. I've been using it since Saturday and, so far, no assignments have been tossed my way but, then again, as far as I know I have not been in the vicinity of any newsworthy events.

For producers looking to fill a sudden news hole, there's not a lot of user-generated content to choose from just yet (aside from videos shot at the conference where Gaige was speakinbg, the most recent video is from a Jan. 23 vigil following the death of former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno).

Rawporter just launched in November, so it may take awhile for accidental journalists to discover the site, and for producers to figure out if they're breaking union contracts by outsourcing camera work for $10 or $25 a clip.

But Hollywood isn't always acting alone. Sometimes, the savviest Web companies around - Netflix, for instance - are playing along, with their own agendas.

The latest example: Not only must Netflix customers wait 56 days before renting Warner Bros. new release discs, but they can't even add them to their rental queues until 28 days after they've been released. Sounds a little nuts, no?

Whether this plan sells more DVDs or not, it's hard to escape the fact that Netflix's user experience is suffering a bit because of it, and that seems like something Netflix should fight. But Netflix is actually on board!

Instead of telling Hollywood to get lost with silly ideas like this, Netflix is cooperating. It doesn't have to buy DVDs directly from studios and play along with 28- or 56-day windows: Netflix can legally go out and buy DVDs anywhere - Walmart, Amazon, you name it - and rent them out as much as it wants. But it isn't doing that. It's playing along.

Why? A couple of reasons. To some extent, because it's easier and more reliable for Netflix to buy discs directly from Warner Bros. instead of relying on third-party vendors. Netflix admits as much (PDF). But more importantly, because Netflix actually has the same goal that the studios do: To try to discourage you from renting DVDs.

The future of Netflix is 100% based on its ability to grow into the best streaming video entertainment service. Renting discs is very profitable for Netflix, but it's the past. That's why it went as far as to try separating its DVD business last year as "Qwikster," and that's why it's letting studios make DVD rentals less attractive with windows and queue restrictions.

The sooner you get disgusted and cancel your DVD rental subscription, the stronger Netflix's case to the studios becomes that they need streaming, or else.

So far, that isn't really happening. An analysis by Tristan Louis shows that all of the top 100 movies from 2010 are available on DVD, but the vast majority aren't available as streaming rentals. Netflix actually had the best streaming rental selection vs. iTunes, Amazon, or Vudu, according to Louis's analysis, but it's still only a small fraction of the top movies. Not yet good enough.

Netflix has been successful in its efforts to reduce its number of DVD subscribers, however, albeit with significant damage to its reputation.

At the end of 2011, Netflix had just 11 million DVD subscribers, down significantly from last year and well below its 22 million streaming subscribers. "We expect DVD subscribers to decline steadily every quarter forever," Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said on the company's Q4 earnings call last week (PDF transcript).

Assuming this trend continues, Netflix will be in a position to say to the studios: Look, the vast majority of our subscribers won't be able to watch this movie unless you stream it. So stream it.

That might not work, anyway. There's plenty of competition on the way for Netflix, ranging from Amazon, Apple and Google to the cable companies. And it will need to keep its edge using other techniques, too, such as obtaining exclusive and/or original programming. But this is the future Netflix is choosing, so it needs to try.

The takeaway: If you're renting discs from Netflix now, expect more weirdness ahead.

Prior to O'Neal's unsolicited endorsement, Tout, which just launched in April, was largely unknown. After Shaq's quick message thanking fans, however, interest in the service exploded. "We got lucky with him being so involved with it," said Melissa Breen of Tout.

But since then, interest in Shaq may have risen thanks for Tout.

Breen claims other Tout users are seeing a boost in followers as a result of the service. A sizzle reel she played on Saturday at Columbia University's social media weekend in New York big increases from average users to Ryan Seacrest. Traffic on the site is growing at about 25% per month.

It's hard to attribute how much of the growth is organic and how much can be attributed to Tout. But the company likes to point to CBS News anchor Katie Couric, who gained 10,000 new Twitter followers within 10 days after she started using the service.

"We don't want to take credit...[but] the only answer is that it's more immersive. People want to connect," Tout's Gardner Loulan told CNET.

After what turned out to be a pretty good year in 2011, Hulu announced last week that they are planning to invest $500 million in new content initiatives. That will undoubtedly include more pricey agreements with traditional content providers, but today the company revealed another place it plans on spending that money: on original programming.

A week before the debut of "Battleground," Netflix will be airing its first installment of original programming as well. A mobster drama called "Lilyhammer" is expected to be the first in a series of Netflix-only shows to launch over the next two years. Next year, the canceled-yet-beloved series "Arrested Development" will be making its triumphant return to screens of all sizes, not through the Fox network on which it originally aired, but exclusively through Netflix.

Web-Only Premium Content: A Disruptive Force?

As early and unproven as this Web-first model is, it may well represent the next phase in Web TV and pose a tangible challenge to traditional content distributors. Such a challenge would come despite the predictions of people like Mark Cuban, who recently wrote a blog post outlining why the television business as we know it isn't going anywhere, despite advances made in the online streaming industry.

Cuban, himself the chairman of a cable network, touts the immediacy and timeliness of the traditional TV model, as well as its inherent value to advertisers, who he says prefer to have their messages reach viewers within a shorter timeframe.

Still, if Web-only series such as those premiering on Netflix and Hulu do particularly well and spawn more like them, that will be one less reason for many people to keep their cable subscriptions, if they ever sign up in the first place. With the arguable exception of live sports and certain popular, premium cable programming, the incentive for subscribing to cable continues to decline, especially as prices climb.

Long the go-to source for LOLcats and viral, homemade videos, YouTube is getting serious about premium content as well, with Google actively seeking more professional video content and redesigning the site to help better showcase that content. This push for premium video comes as Google TV is being revamped and added to more connected devices and television sets.

Cable may not go extinct overnight, but if what we saw come out of CES last week is any indication, the future of TV is very much connected to the Web and far more interactive than ever.

For now, Twitvid's frontpage interface looks more like Digg's (before the social newsrooms). It shows most popular TwitVids by views, along with a featured Twitvid and a Twitvid Tuesdays Winner. There is a list of popular members on the right rail. Twitvid is tossing this simplistic design for user profiles that focus on personalized video taste. Sharing will be more focused around personal interests rather than top rated content. Imagine the Facebook news feed, but only populated by video that has been personalized to your tastes.

Twitvid will also feature channels organized around specific interests.

Twitvid has seen its user base grow 100% since last year. Currently there are more than 12 million unique visitors. Twitvid launched in May 2009. We first wrote about it in July 2009, back when it was a a brand new iPhone app for uploading video to Twitter.

At first glance, a company with the size and clout of Verizon would appear to be a formidable potential challenger to Netflix, who has been especially vulnerable lately. Still, there are reasons to doubt that Verizon would be successful in making a dent in Netflix's dominance of this space.

Verizon's Initial Limitations

Yet there are a few caveats reportedly coming with Verizon's new offering. For one, it's not going to be available anywhere that Verizon offers FiOS service. Geographically, that's a huge portion of the U.S., but many major U.S. cities, especially along the East Coast, have access to FiOS and thus won't have the option to sign up for the new service.

It's also apparently going to have a limited selection of content at first, with only a handful of content providers signing on. After all, Verizon wants wants to move further into the online video space, but is not exactly eager to disrupt the pay TV industry.

As rocky as things have been for Netflix's brand in the last few months, the company still has the benefit of being a relatively young Internet company without the baggage and reputation of a bloated telecom. There is, at least to a small yet growing extent, some philosophical resistance to the idea of signing up with such companies for anything more than an Internet connection. In all likelihood, Verizon's streaming service would be aggressively bundled with its other products.

Still, for existing Verizon customers (and there are more than a handful), a competitively-priced streaming service could be attractive enough to add to that monthly bill.

What do you think? Would you sign up for a Netflix competitor from Verizon?

The acquisition, which cost Microsoft a reported $70 million, brings facial and object-recognition video search to the XBox, so it no longer relies solely on descriptions and other meta data when conducting searches. It works across services, so a search for "Lady Gaga" will return results from Netflix, Hulu and a variety of online video sources.

In the meantime, they're also going to be rolling out voice search capabilities on the Kinect for XBox 360, which will add a Siri-like functionality to the experience. The Kinect can already understand basic voice commands for things like pausing and playing a movie, in addition to its infamously awesome motion-based, hands-free controls.

Microsoft said they plan on launching voice search for XBox LIVE over the course of the holiday season and they expect the VideoSurf integration to improve the functionality over time.

Think of Spreecast like a multi-person video chat service mashed up with a traditional, text-based live chat feature. It allows up to four people to appear on camera at one time and invites an unlimited number of viewers, all of whom can make comment and ask questions of the participants. Alternatively, sessions can be held privately.

Each Spreecast chat is archived and saved for later viewing, which makes it an ideal tool for educational live chats and business presentations.

So how is this thing being used? Klout CEO Joe Fernandez participated in a chat in September in which he announced an important product update. The editorial team for Al Jazeera's The Stream has used it to broadcast editorial meetings and invite public participation. Those are just some examples from the product's closed beta period, so expect to see more use cases unfold if it takes off.

Spreecast is the latest venture from Jeff Fluhr, the former CEO of online ticket marketplace StubHub, which is now owned by eBay. Fluhr said that the social Web we know and love lacks some of the nuances of human interaction, so he set "to bring face-to-face interactions to the Internet in a far-reaching way" with this new offering.

There could be several books written about the battle for Flash against mobile. "Steve Jobs' Last Laugh" could probably be finished in time for the holiday shopping season. "How To Kill Flash For Dummies" would be an enlightening title as well. It is a bittersweet day for many. We want to know: how are you reacting to the passing of Flash for mobile? Take the poll below.

The fall of one platform is often correlated to the rise of another. Look at Android vs. Blackberry or Chrome vs. Firefox, Google vs. Yahoo, Internet Explorer vs. Netscape. The death of mobile Flash is seen as the ultimate validation of HTML5. The evolution of this battle on mobile will take place with native apps vs. Web apps though there is no clear indication yet what will ultimately be the winner in that sweepstakes.

Adobe will now focus on HTML5 development and tools that can be used to help developers. The company's recent acquisition of PhoneGap maker Nitobi will help ease the pain in Adobe's mobile development cycles and should not be overlooked as a major factor in this decision to kill mobile Flash.

The pages of ReadWriteWeb have been filled with Flash news for the last four years. Like so many things in the last decade, the argument was created by our generation's largest tech luminary, Steve Jobs. A lot of pundits and tech insiders took Jobs' words for gospel and that fueled the bashing of Flash that has led to this point. On the other hand, there have been a lot of hardworking people (with a lot of money) that have tried to fix the problems Flash had on mobile devices for the last several years. This cannot be a good day for them as something they have been working on for years has been obsoleted overnight.

Take a look at some of the highlights of our Flash coverage from the last couple of years and take the poll below to let us know how you feel.

ReadWriteWeb's Notable Flash Coverage:

• Steve Jobs Wins: Adobe to Give Up Mobile Flash for HTML5
• Steve Jobs Speaks: Why We Don't Allow Flash on iPhones and iPads
• On Mobile Flash, Apple Stands Alone
• Does HTML5 Really Beat Flash? The Surprising Results of New Tests
• EU May Force Flash Onto Apple Products
• Adobe Releases Flash to HTML5 Conversion Tool
• HTML5 Scores a Point as SlideShare Ditches Flash Entirely
• Adobe: Flash is an Exception to Windows 8's 'Plug-in Free' Rule
• Adobe Flash Player 10.2 Ready For Honeycomb; Honeycomb Not Ready For Anything
• Farewell Flash? Adobe Launches HTML5 Web Animations Tool "Adobe Edge"
• Google Swiffy Converts Flash to HTML5
• B&N's Nook Color Gets Apps, Flash & More in Major Update
• Flash Video Comes to the iPhone, iPad with Skyfire
• How to Install Flash on your iPhone (The Easy Way)
• Apple Approved: iSwifter Lets You Play Popular Flash Games on the iPad
• Worried About Flash on the iPad? Apple Tries to Ease Your Fears
• No Flash? No Worries: Majority of Online Video Now Available in HTML5
• YouTube: Flash Still Beats HTML5
• Flash Now Importable to HTML5 Canvas
• Death to Flash: 3 Great HTML 5 Demos
• Adobe Celebrates, But Will Flash Developers Return to Apple?
• Proof of Concept Brings Flash to the iPhone
• MobiUs Accelerates Mobile HTML5 Development, Aims to Kill Mobile Flash

What's Trending has built its own audience online though and a faux pas that would have axed the connection between a content producer and its audience in the past is now not such a game ender when media pros can build direct connections without complete reliance on major distribution deals. Now that the What's Trending team is on its own again, it's taking dramatic steps to build and deepen that audience by juggling a dazzling assortment of new media tools simultaneously. All while streaming live to thousands of people online.

Here's what What's Trending is experimenting with right now to combine live TV with online social media:

The show streams live on Livestream.com but that stream is embedded in a chat room on Chill.com. There, while the show is being broadcast live, up to three staff members are in the chat room at once participating in conversation. They share links in support of the on-screen content, they moderate conversation to keep it high level and they grab highlighted questions and feedback to share it live with the show's on-camera social media correspondent. Guests are encouraged to engage in the chat as well and Lazar says Snoop Dog was particularly active there when he was a guest.

A day after the show broadcasts live, the crew does a live replay and chats with viewers live again. They share what they were thinking at each moment in the show, take feedback from viewers and answer questions.

In between episodes, the team solicits video comments on another service called VYou. They ask for viewers' thoughts about whatever the topic of the week is, then they edit video replies they get down to a one minute highlight reel that gets broadcast as part of the show. "Getting people to post video comments is one of the hardest things to do online," says the show's Executive Producer, Damon Berger. Berger notes that each episode gets seventy give to one hundred thousand views each, including as many as fifteen thousand concurrent viewers, but that audience has so far produced only ten to twenty video responses per week.

That feature may or may not work with the show's audience, though the team seems convinced that there's more than enough material to produce sixty seconds of high quality edited content already.

One tactic the team says is working well is prompting viewers to check in to the show on entertainment check-in network GetGlue. The show has amassed more than thirty thousand check-ins in just a few months of using the service. Users who check in on GetGlue get rewarded for their loyalty to the show and can get What's Trending stickers sent to them in the mail. Each time they check in, a users' friends are all told about the show as well.

What's Trending is broadcasting live right now at 3pm PST with a special episode about internet bullying and teen suicide, a topic that might seem trite if you're a cynic but is actually very relevant to the internet community the show draws from and serves. The episode will combine guests from related organizations, internet celebrities, debut music videos and more.

It will all be run through the living experiment of multi-platform viewer engagement that What's Trending is using and building at the same time. It's an effort that could help illuminate some developments in the future of entertainment on the web and it's ambitious enough to be downright inspirational.

Over the past decades, the promise of video as a standard form of communication has been presented to us through many mediums, from Star Trek to The Jetsons and even through my old Avengers comic books over 30 years ago. While corporations utilize video conferencing technology at a rapid rate, it hasn't yet penetrated the daily habits of people across the globe but it will.

The core technology has been there for decades, but not the bandwidth and compression technology along with the hardware to make it an everyday utility. With the growth of Skype's video chat, Google's GTalk, Apple's Facetime and other services, combined with the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, video will become the standard form of communications versus SMS, voice only and even email in some situations within a few years. Drilling down further, here are a few trends that I see.

The days of text-based communications as a primary tool are reaching an end. SMS is slowly being replaced by mobile video chat services such as Facetime, Qik (acquired by Skype earlier this year) and Tango. Even just looking at Tango's numbers reveals a rapidly changing landscape. Two months after their launch late last year, it hit over 4 million users and now boasts 23 million users. I can tell you that those users are SMSing less often these days.

Video Will Replace Live Chat Communications

I see the same trend for Web-based text communications, whether through personal services, such as AIM, or business applications, such as various live chat services.

New Efficiencies And Disruptions Will Take Place Across Industries

One area is healthcare. The promise of telemedicine has been coming for over a decade, but I believe today's combination of technology, hardware and bandwidth will bring it to fruition. How much more efficient will doctor "visits" become? Unnecessary visits and waste will decrease while increasing the reach of various experts. Where else can video transform an industry? Education? Construction?

What other trends do you see with the coming ubiquity of video communications? I would love to hear other ideas or feedback on my thoughts!

Photo by jacopoL

The startup hasn't been publicly unveiled, but the company recently launched a splash page with a trademarked logo for Vdio and the slogan "Are you watching?" The site's launch wasn't announced and it's currently blocking search engines from crawling it. The trademark on the page was traced by GigaOm to Pulser Music Services, which is the company that launched music streaming service Rdio in 2009.

With Vdio, the duo is likely taking a new approach, most likely informed by their experience with subscription music service Rdio and this time, aiming squarely for Netflix.

How Vulnerable Is Netflix?

Netflix has been having a rough six weeks or so. Just as its controversial subscription rate hike took effect in the beginning of September, the company made another wildly unpopular announcement: that it would be spinning off its DVD rental service into a seperate business with its own branding and website and keeping Netflix intact as a streaming-only company. Those plans have since been abandoned. Meanwhile, the company has seen its stock price drop as it has lost an estimated 1 million customers.

Despite these recent troubles, Netflix still has 25 million customers and lots of content deals in place, which seem to keep on coming. It's a leader in the online video space and doesn't appear to be going anywhere anytime soon.

Building a Top-Notch Team, But to Launch What?

Still, that hasn't stopped Friis and Zennstrom from assembling a mega-team to work on this startup, which appears to be codenamed Project WBS. That's the name of the entity that owns the Vdio trademark, which counts alumni from Joost, the Apache Foundation, NBC and somebody from Netflix with content aquisition experience. They've even hired somebody from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for their experience wrangling especially gigantic data sets.

The collective experience of Project WBS is impressive enough that whatever they're building, it's a rather serious foray into the online video space.

Other than what bloggers have dug up, very little is known about the company and its actual plans. They appear to be set to launch in the UK first. Their splash page accepts sign-ups via Facebook, but registering doesn't unlock any additional functionality or details about the service.

The announcement comes after bids from several big tech companies evidently failed to pique the interest of Hulu's current owners. In July, we wrote about why Amazon would make an ideal owner for the service and fold it into its Prime video offerings. Other serious contenders included Yahoo, Dish and Google.

For Google, the purchase could have helped the company shore up its digital video properties, something thats crucial to its future advertising revenue, as well as to the survival of Google TV, which has been met by a lukewarm reaction by consumers so far.

Alas, it was not meant to be. Without offering a shred of detail, the company's owners have pulled off its "for sale" sign, at least for the foreseeable future.