The new logos are just a preview of AOL's revamped look and are meant to replace AOL's swoosh triangle for good. The AOL "running man," however, will stick around the brand in some form, although the company isn't saying exactly where he will show up.

But the updated logos are a little off-putting to some. Noted technology blogger Om Malik of GigaOM posted his gut reaction Sunday night, calling them out as "lame," "ambiguous at best," and "as sexy as the obese, shapeless humans living on Axiom, the flagship of the BnL fleet in Pixar movie WALL-E." Ouch!

But it's easy to see where he's coming from. After all, some of the logos look more like the sorts of doodles you would find gracing high-schoolers' notebooks - like the hand doing the "sign of the horns" hand gesture. Really. "Rock on!," shouts the logo, but it reminds us more of a middle-aged heavy metal fan reminiscing about their youth than the young, hip company AOL desperately hopes to become.

Then there is the pink glob. The best way to describe this logo is a fluffy wad of bubble gum. A green scribble looks like someone had trouble getting their ballpoint ink pen going and a generic blue swirl seems to signify nothing but a lack of imagination. What content sites are these logos even associated with? Your guess is as good as ours.

CNET calls the goldfish logo "cute" (sarcastically?), but AOL isn't trying to build the next LOLcats empire, so maybe they should have forgone "cute" for something a little more meaningful and modern.

But that's just our opinion. What's yours? Let us know in the poll below.

In the latter parts of the study, the company looked specifically at social network membership data for users of the AOL, Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo webmail services. Not surprisingly, the study found that Facebook was the most popular network across the board. What's more interesting is how well MySpace fared in some cases. On both the Hotmail and Yahoo webmail services, Facebook only had a small lead. Here, around 20% of all Hotmail and Yahoo webmail users were found to be on Facebook and MySpace. What does this reveal about the Hotmail and Yahoo user base? That they're a little more behind the times? Or that they've been around on the net longer and at one time had created (and possibly now abandoned) their MySpace pages? Unfortunately, the study can't provide us with these sorts of answers.

The study also showed that Twitter is far more popular among Gmail users than anyone else. In fact, on the other services, it's 4-5 times less popular than Facebook. We would like to think that's because Gmail users are just more web-savvy and cool, but it's possible that it's because they're just younger than everyone else.

Not surprisingly, LinkedIn is the least popular social network, but as Rapleaf points out, many LinkedIn users may have registered with their business email instead.

Participation Levels - Hotmail Users have Most Profiles, Gmail Users Better-Connected

When it comes to how the webmail users participate on social networks, Rapleaf found that the majority of the users have only one social media profile. But the service where the average number of profiles is the highest might surprise you - it's Hotmail. There the average is 2.5 profiles per user. Hotmail is followed by Yahoo, then AOL, and it's Gmail users who have the least number of social media profiles. That finding seems odd considering that Gmail users are younger and more likely to use Twitter in addition to Facebook. In fact, it almost seems like this data doesn't even fit with the rest of the study.

However, the discovery that Gmail users are better-connected than the other users makes more sense. On average, Gmail users have the most friends on social networks with 46.2 friends while Yahoo users have the least with 40.0.

Since again, Gmail users tend to be younger than the rest, it goes to reason that they would be in a demographic where their peers are more likely to have social membership profiles. Older webmail users, meanwhile, are still signing up for these sites. Although baby boomers and other middle-aged folks are joining sites like Facebook in droves these days, social networks are still dominated by the young.

Methodology

For the Rapleaf study, the company sampled 120,000 webmail accounts from users with @aol.com, @gmail.com, @hotmail.com and @yahoo.com email addresses. They then looked into the users' age, gender and social networking data by collecting information from public social media profiles. Obviously, in doing so, they've skewed their findings a bit, as the company notes in their original blog post. However, the sample size is large enough to form some conclusions about the members of these services, even if it relied on a particular subset of users.

Chances are that Amex is mostly interested in the P2P payment system that Revolution Money has developed. It will be interesting to see what the company will do with the Revolution Money card, which, even though widely accepted, hasn't exactly become a household name yet. Amex also plans to expand Revolution Money's reach beyond the US.

Lots of Participating Merchants - But How Many Customers?

The Revolution Money card is currently accepted at about 650,000 stores in the US, including Barnes & Noble and Whole Foods. Merchants have been drawn to Revolution Money because the company charges lower fees than credit card companies. The company didn't announce how many actual users it currently has, though just like GigaOm's Om Malik, we still haven't met anybody who owns a Revolution Money card.

Of those who follow a brand on Twitter, nearly 44% reported that access to exclusive deals is the main reason. On Facebook or MySpace, 37% said that access to exclusive deals or offers was their main reason for friending brands.

43.5% reported following a brand to get "exclusive deals or offerings," which again is a statistic that companies should take note of.

An even higher percentage of respondents have "friended" a brand on Facebook - a whopping 40%. Considering that Facebook is a social network that started out as a way for college kids to network, this is a statistic that will make companies and organizations take note. If you want brand recognition on the Web, according to these statistics there's a very good chance that Facebook is a place you want to be.

A smaller percentage follow a brand on Facebook for exclusive deals or offers (36.9%) - but still a majority.

Is this "connected consumer" crowd mainstream? Well, about 62% of the respondents still use Internet Explorer as their browser, with 30% on Firefox. So yes, they are.

It's interesting then to look at what are the homepages of these people.

While Google is unsurprisingly number 1 with 32.6%, Yahoo is close behind at 29.7%. MSN is still well used at 11.9%. We were most surprised that AOL is now only 7.9%. These statistics show that Yahoo remains a force among mainstream consumers, whereas AOL is slipping further behind.

We reported last week that smartphones have almost overtaken 'feature phones' as the cellphones of choice for consumers. Razorfish's survey shows that 56% of connected consumers now use a smartphone - i.e. one that has email and web capabilities.

As with the ChangeWave Research survey recently, Razorfish puts Blackberry (29.5%) ahead of Apple's iPhone (20.1%).

Another illuminating statistic is the number of people who now get their news from Twitter and Facebook. While nearly 80% of respondents still access "traditional news web sites," 33% get news from Facebook and 19.5% from Twitter. Only 27.3% get news from "alternative news web sites" - by which we presume they mean blogs.

Overall, these figures from Razorfish show that Facebook and Twitter are now major places for brands to be; as well as online sites where consumers get at least some of their news.

The company plans to roll this redesign out slowly over the next few weeks - though all users will be able to switch to the new site through a link on the old homepage.

Fewer Links - Less Clutter

To make the site less busy, Microsoft has reduced the number of links by 50%. In the old design, the categories were organized in dozens of boxes. This gave the page a very busy look. Microsoft now uses tabs that give the site a more modern look and which also reduce clutter.

The new MSN puts a lot of emphasis on search. The new homepage doesn't just feature a Bing search box on the top. The new MSN has another search box at the bottom of the page and Microsoft also integrated Bing shopping and travel search in other sections of the site.

MSN Users Don't Want Customization

When we talked to Lisa Gurry, Microsoft's senior director of MSN, she told us that only a very small number of MSN's users actually wanted to spend a lot of time customizing the site. Because of this, the MSN team decided to automate this customization as much as possible through a reverse IP lookup. Through this, the homepage automatically displays local news and weather reports based on a user's location. Those users who want to customize their MSN experience extensively can continue to use the MyMSN homepage.

Flawed Execution: Facebook and Twitter Integration

Microsoft also added some new social networking functionality to the MSN homepage. Users can now track updates from their friends on Twitter, Facebook and Windows Live. MSN's users can also send status updates right from the MSN homepage. According to Microsoft, 52% of MSN users are on Facebook and 14% are on Twitter.

A few key features are missing from the Twitter integration, though. There is no character count, for example, and no easy way to shrink URLs. There is also no way to see or send direct messages or @replies.

While the Facebook widget at least features a 'comment' link, users are still taken to Facebook's own site to write their comments.

Overall, the social network integration could be a lot more interesting if the MSN team just added a few features. MSN is obviously trying to attract mainstream users who don't follow thousands of Twitter users, but even the most mainstream Twitter user expects to see a reply button in a Twitter client. AOL's homepage allows users to reply right from the Twitter widget.

Local News

The new site now puts a lot of emphasis on local news. The new local edition features extended weather reports, movie times, concerts, restaurant reviews and information about local gas prices. For restaurant reviews, Microsoft takes users to Bing's local search.

Radical Change

The new design is a radical departure from the old MSN and some users who were accustomed to the old site will surely feel disoriented when they wake up to the new design.

Among the large homepages like Yahoo and AOL, the new MSN now sports the most modern look. This is not a highly customizable, Netvibes-style homepage, but MSN's users aren't asking for this.

This case had been in litigation for years, having been originally filed back in 2007. The problem stemmed from the fact that internet sites such as AutoAdmit are essentially able to operate under different rules than those that apply to TV and newspapers when it comes to libel. This is due to a law called "Section 230," which immunizes internet publishers from legal harm. At the time of its establishment in the 90's, however, those "publishers" were the ISPs themselves - the AOLs and CompuServes that delivered Internet access to consumers. The idea of bloggers, social media publishers, and anonymous blog and forum commenters didn't really exist yet and therefore wasn't taken into consideration. That meant the women weren't able to sue the operators of the discussion board website itself, but had to go after the anonymous posters instead. That, of course, was quite the challenge.

In the end, the women's attorneys were able to identify some eight or nine of the anonymous posters, according to the Hartford Courant and they settled with some of them.

Because the terms of the settlement were confidential, the lawyers representing the former students, Heide Iravani and Brittan Heller, would not discuss them. However, San Francisco attorney Ashok Ramani, whose firm, Keker & Van Nest took the case pro-bono said that their clients were "very pleased with how the case went." The women had sued for monetary damages so a settlement means they were likely awarded at least some of the amount they had hoped for.

Was the Settlement a Win or a Loss? Depends on Who You Ask

Marc Randazza, the attorney for one of the defendants scoffed that if the women's intention were to have the negative comments removed, their interests were very poorly served. "Now there's even an Encyclopedia Dramatica page for them," he told the Yale Daily News.

However, David Rosen, one of the women's attorneys and a Yale Law professor, countered that unmasking some of these anonymous posters who were hiding behind pseudonyms and then holding them accountable for what they said had accomplished "the fundamental goals of the case." He thinks the suit may even have some internet commenters thinking twice before posting. The possibility of a lawsuit "may make some people pause before posting comments that are malicious and completely indefensible," Rosen was quoted as saying.

Will This Really Change Things?

While obviously a major case, this suit isn't the first time a defamation case like this has been brought to court. In fact, only months ago, an anonymous blogger using Google's Blogger.com service was sued for rants she made about a fellow model, one Liskula Cohen, on her site "Skanks in NYC." The victim sued to reveal the identity of the malicious blogger. Thanks to a judge's ruling that Google must hand over to Cohen any identifying information they had on the site's creator, the blogger in question was revealed to be Rosemary Port. (She's now suing Google for not protecting her).

Although a slightly different case, the womens' suit involving the forum commenters also succeeded - at least in part - in revealing the identities of those posting the defamatory messages. Combined with the prior example, it will be interesting to see what impact these cases have on the online world. Will this lead to more lawsuits where alleged victims seek to out the identities of their internet foes? Will it lead to more self-policing among the commenting community? Will internet trolls actually think before they type?

It's too soon to say, but it's possible that a kinder, gentler - and possibly more boring - internet may be in our future.

Yahoo Search continues its steady decline. Yahoo Search lost another 1% market share last month and has now lost a total of 5% since September 2008 when it still owned 18.8% of the market according to Compete. The total search volume on Yahoo was down 8% and Yahoo served 100 million less queries in September than August.

Google, Ask and AOL Hold Steady

Google's market share grew slightly from 72.3% to 72.6%, while Ask and AOL remained stable. Based on this data, Bing seems to be eating into Yahoo's market share, but isn't growing at Google's expense.

Searches Per Day

Compete's Marko Madjarac points out that Bing's numbers are even more impressive when we take into account that Bing's users tend to perform fewer searches on the service (5 searches per user per day) than Google's users (5.6 searches). Bing apparently lives up to its promise to get users to relevant answers faster than any other search engine. Yahoo users performed an average of 7.8 searches per day.

Rapleaf says that despite their collection methods, their findings can offer insight into these different userbases. To some extent, that may be true, but we're left wondering how different these findings would be if they hadn't relied on public social media data and rather went with a true random sample.

Gmail Skews Young, AOL Older

That being said, here's what Rapleaf came up with. In terms of age:

It's not all that surprising that Gmail users tend to be young. After all, the service was established years after AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo. Some of those who already had webmail accounts on other services were hesitant to switch at first (and some still are) since the process of changing email accounts is never entirely painless and often leads to months of checking dual inboxes for emails that may have been missed. Instead, Google's growth likely came from more webmail first-timers looking to set up their brand-new online accounts in addition to the braver "email switchers," a group that also probably skews younger...especially since an effective switchover often requires a bit of technical savvy involving setting up forwarding, auto-responders, etc.

As for AOL being comprised of older users, that too, is relatively unsurprising. Where Google is the newest service, AOL is one of the oldest. Its core user base has aged with it over the years and those who haven't jumped shipped yet are bound to be the older members who don't stay as current with changing technology trends. Still, setting the bar for "old" at 36 is a little humbling - especially for those of us getting up in our years. (That's not old, is it?) It would be interesting to see further breakdowns of this demographic into age segments including 40+, 50+, and so on, but that data was not available.

Gmail Has More Females, Hotmail Has More Males

Perhaps more interesting is the gender variations between the services. Gmail, for instance, includes more females (53%) than males (47%). If those were election poll results, we would call it "too close to call," but in terms of tens of thousands of users, these percentage point differences have meaning.

Why would Gmail attract more females? And conversely, why does Hotmail have more males? (It's 57% male.) Is there something about the aesthetics, workflow or features in those services that appeal more to women than men or vice versa? And if so, what? Unfortunately, raw data can't provide these sorts of answers, but they're definitely intriguing to us. We would imagine they are intriguing to the user interface designers and engineers behind the products, too.

Do women like Gmail's drag-and-drop features or its themes? Do men prefer Hotmail's efficient "quick adds" which allow for one-click additions of Bing content to messages? We doubt those are the reasons for the discrepancy, but it makes us wonder what are. Try as we might, we can't come up with an easy theory to explain this. (If you can, please share in the comments.)

Future details about the study will focus on other data including online activity, friend counts, and social network memberships. Stay tuned to Rapleaf's site for more information.

A new report by Openwave provides more evidence of this trend. Their findings show that four of the top ten domains accessed via mobile devices are social networking sites. Facebook and MySpace, of course, featured prominently on that list.

The company's Fall 2009 report highlights mobile Internet use trends in North America and uses data from an unnamed tier-one mobile operator who offers services to both consumers and business. The data sampled represents a five-day period in September of this year.

Among the top ten domains by page impressions are four social networking sites: Facebook, MySpace, Myxer, and Plenty-of-Fish, the last two being a ringtone creation and sharing site and a dating network, respectively. The inclusion of those two under the banner "social networking" is a little iffy, at best. Dating sites could be considered a category of social networking, we suppose, but Myxer seems more like an entertainment destination than a social network.

The other top domains making the list included about.com, accuweather.com, craigslist.org, imdb.com, wap.aol.com, and calltunes.operator.com. While we have no reason to doubt the accuracy of this study, we find it odd that google.com didn't make an appearance. It seems like we google something on our mobile phones on a daily basis - don't you?

Still, despite these questions, it's clear from the findings that social networks are a popular destination for mobile users, even if you only count MySpace and Facebook. Those two sites alone racked up the impressions as both the number one and number three sites visited.

MySpace Beats Facebook? Really?

Oddly, the chart shows that MySpace beat out Facebook, another questionable finding given that once popular site's rapid decline in traffic as of late. Recent numbers from the U.S.-centric analytics firm Compete, for example, showed MySpace traffic dropping from 55.6 million unique visitors in August to 50.2 million in September. Given such a sharp decline, you would expect to see a similar drop in mobile visits as well. 

Meanwhile, Facebook announced that they saw 65 million visits from mobile phones in the month of August, a huge rise from what was only 20 million back in December of 2007. Could they really be beaten out by that much on the mobile web according to this particular carrier? According to Openwave's report, they are.

While this recent report left us wondering, we have no doubt that social network use via mobile phones is trending upward these days. As the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) reported last month, there has been a one-year increase of 179% in subscribers accessing social networking sites from their mobile devices while those same sites only saw a 10% increase on the PC versions of the sites. And they're just one of many other outlets reporting similar trends. Social networking via the mobile phone is obviously a hot trend these days and one that hasn't peaked yet.

In yesterday's attack, the list of comprised Hotmail accounts were limited to those where the usernames started with the letter "A" or "B." However, that seemed to imply that the posted portion might actually be a part of a bigger list containing even more login/password combinations. At the time, a Microsoft spokesperson said that the company determined "this was not a breach of internal Microsoft data and initiated our standard process of working to help customers regain control of their accounts." Instead, claimed the spokesperson, those users whose credentials were revealed were likely to be victims of an online phishing attack where a third-party website was involved.

Phishing attacks are typically carried out via email messages where the attacker tricks the recipient into revealing their username and password by pretending to be some sort of trustworthy entity such as the user's bank, IT administrator, a popular website, or an online service. In the case of the stolen Hotmail passwords, it's possible that the attacker sent emails which claimed to be from the end user's email provider. If the user then followed the link contained within the malicious email, they would have ended up not on the actual email provider's site, but on a third-party site whose sole purpose was to capture their username and password when entered.

Beyond Hotmail: More Webmail Providers Affected

According to a story in today's BBC News, the most recent list of compromised accounts, which includes login credentials for Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Earthlink, and Comcast users, contains some accounts that appear to be old, unused, or fake. However, many others listed are, in fact, genuine.

There's no way to be sure at this point that the new list is a part of the same phishing attack as yesterday's or if it's a new and separate scam.

The website where the accounts were posted - pastebin.com - is now "down for maintenance." Visitors to the site today will receive a message that reads:

Pastebin.com is getting an unprecedented amount of traffic due to a news story in which some leaked Hotmail passwords have been pasted on this site

Pastebin.com was intended as a tool to aid software developers, not for distributing this sort of material. Filters have been put in place to prevent reoccurrence, but the current traffic level is unsustainable.

Pastebin.com is just a fun side project for me, and today it's not fun. It will remain offline all day while I make some further modifications

Paul Dixon

Regardless of whether or not you think your account was compromised, today would be a good day to change the password on whichever webmail service you currently use. Better safe than sorry!

AOL's PlaySavvy: PlaySavvy is another site that offers parents a chance to check out age-appropriate kids games. Similar to What They Play, this site lists the ESRB ratings next to games and information is categorized by topic and gaming system. Products for console favorites like Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii are often featured on the site. AOL also offers parents daily articles and a section to view the most popular games.

Parents' Choice: Established in 1978, this site is run by the Parents' Choice Foundation - a nonprofit organization that offers awards to the top children's media and toys. Some of the award categories include websites, video games, DVDs, software, television programming and toys. This site definitely skews towards narrative-based educational materials. If your kid has a shorter attention span, you might want to visit PBS Kids instead.

Common Sense Media: Common Sense media is a nonprofit organizations dedicated to offering parents reviews and suggestions on appropriate content. The group produces movie, website, TV, game, book and music ratings as well as a number of educational tools for classroom use. The site can be personalized for kids between the ages of 2-17 years old and it's available in English and Spanish. This site tends to weigh the benefits of mainstream media sites.

PBS KIDS Island: This site offers parents reading resources, videos and games in English and Spanish. While the majority of the content is best queued up by a parent or teacher, the videos are of particularly high quality and completely commercial free.

National Geographic for Kids: This site offers kid-friendly games, videos, stories and activities for nature lovers. The same photography that has made National Geographic a hit with grownups is likely to please kids. Not surprisingly, the video content is equally compelling. Discovery Kids offers a similar experience and is a great site for visual learners.

Totlol: Totlol is a parent-moderated version of YouTube. The site offers video options specifically designed for children and even offers "age optimized interfaces" to ensure that kids of different ages get the most appropriate content. In 2008, ReadWriteWeb covered Totlol's beta launch. As of today the site charges a $3 per month subscription fee or $54 until your child grows up.

Photo Credit:Swaminathan

With the new version launching today, Fuze Meeting also makes adding collaborators easier than before as it now integrates with several email applications, social networks, and IM platforms. Supported services for gathering contacts include Outlook, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, and LinkedIn. Additionally, you can share links to your online meetings with others via Facebook and Twitter, which is great for promoting a public meeting or event. Skype integration is also new, letting Fuse users chat with their online buddies from within the web conferencing software. Meeting participants can use Skype to join in the audio portion of the meetings, too.

However, the most interesting new feature in this latest version is the new support for mobile web conferencing. Currently offering both Blackberry and iPhone versions, Fuze Meeting users can schedule, launch, and join in meetings directly from their mobile device. On the iPhone, users can even share media from their phone's photo library. As with the desktop solution, mobile users can view screen shares, documents, photos and videos.

Fuze Meeting vs. HP SkyRoom

At the DEMO conference, Fuze Meeting followed a launch from HP, who also debuted a new online meeting solution called SkyRoom. Like Fuze Meeting, SkyRoom's big selling points are affordability and support for sharing HD content. But when Fuze showed off their mobilized versions, it was HP that appeared to come up lacking. In today's modern workplace, where folks are working remotely, on the go, and often only have a mobile smartphone available for connecting with their colleagues, it's Fuze Meeting that seems to have the more forward-thinking solution. However, since HP plans on including SkyRoom for free on all HP workstations starting October 1st of this year, they'll definitely have an edge up in terms of user base.

To try Fuze Meeting, choose your pricing plan here and then click "Get Started" to begin the signup process.

Today, Austrian smartphone development shop Mobilizy, creator of the Wikitude World Browser, has announced it will be presenting a standard AR markup language (ARML) to the the AR Consortium. Such a step would remove one of the five barriers to AR that we recently wrote about: interoperability. Cross-platform, open development standards would allow users more ways to see more AR content. Read on for a video and details.

In our recent post on barriers to mobile AR, Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote, "Right now you cannot see information from the Wikitude AR environment if you're looking through the Layar AR browser. This could be the coming of a new browser war just like that of the 1990s... A lack of interoperability between AR environments would be a tragedy of the same type as if the web had remained defined by the islands of AOL and Compuserve or Internet Explorer, forever."

Layar, Mobilizy's biggest competitor in the AR space and who just today announced the addition of a 3D interface to its platform, has spoken publicly about interoperability in the past. Layar's co-founder Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald told us, "The lock-ins and exclusivity won't work. Openness and interoperability are where it's going; we're going to discover how exactly with other people...That's where it's going: control to the user."

The basic idea of the ARML specification is that the data can be viewed on any augmented reality browser but also in Google Earth. Augmented reality browsers can include an open URL dialog where the user can enter an URL pointing to a valid ARML document, and users can then easily bookmark those URLs. The markup language is based on KML, Google's Keyhole Markup Language for mapping applications that was just turned over to the Open Geospatial Consortium last year.

Here's a video from Wikitude explaining more:

Features of the proposed specification include the following:

• Founded upon KML with extension name-space for AR specific data;
• Placement of a "View in AR" icon which clearly identifies a mobile
• website that supports location aware (real time) data in an ARML
• browser;
• Compliance with basic XML document structure - no proprietary
• programming API required to create an AR layer.
• ARML adherent data can be viewed on ARML browsers (e.g. Wikitude)
• and KML browsers (e.g. Google Earth);
• Custom styling of AR data (points of interest) via standard KML
• styling elements; and
• Initial support for UTF-8 encoding.

Mobilizy is offering limited access to the preview version of their upcoming ARML browser. Interested parties and developers with questions about the ARML specification should email Mobilizy.

Just last week, MySpace also announced that its users can now sync their updates with Microsoft's Live profiles. For now, the new two-way sync feature only works with Twitter, though the company notes that it will soon support other networks as well.

AOL also just announced two-way syncing with Twitter when it launched its AIM Lifestream service last week.  Overall, these services aren't very earth-shattering, but it is good to see that MySpace continues to open up and create more links with other services.

It's also becoming increasingly clear that Twitter is now the de facto clearinghouse for status updates. Pretty much every new service that features status updates already pushes updates to Twitter and now most of the older services are also (slowly) coming on board.

This June, Brightcove's CEO Jeremy Allaire told Sillicon Alley Insider that the company was now profitable and that he expected the company to see a 50% revenue growth in 2009.

Is Google Buying Brightcove's Tech or Its Customers?

While Google could obviously offer the same kind of services Brightcove currently offers on its own YouTube platform, Brightcove has already locked in most of the customers that Google would also be competing for. Also, while YouTube was designed as a consumer platform (even as Google is slowly moving to featuring more commercial content on the site), Brightcove has set up a platform that gives enterprise customers the flexibility and metrics they need. In the end, though, if this rumor is true, Google is most likely more interested in Brightcove's customer base than in its technology.

We asked both Google and Brightcove for a comment about this rumor and will update the post when/if we hear from them.

Update: as Dan Rayburn points out in the comments below and on his blog, Brightcove's setup requires its customers to use third-party content-delivery networks like Limelight to stream their videos. If Google really acquires Brightcove, this could turn out to be a problem, as it would keep Google from being able to use YouTube's (cheap) infrastructure.