Yesterday, Google TV's Facebook page seeded that a big announcement was coming. When Peter Kafka revealed that this YouTube app was it, he concluded that it was no big deal. But as far as Google TV goes, the YouTube app is big. YouTube is the new television. It's smart TV's killer app. But YouTube is not exclusive to Google TV. If Google TV wants to be relevant, it has to offer the best YouTube experience around.

YouTube was redesigned around topical channels and social networks in December. 2011 was a humongous year for YouTube. It racked up over 1 trillion views. YouTube also worked on major content deals with pro sports leagues and Disney movies last year. This year, YouTube was the venue for an online campaign stop by President Obama. It's starting to eclipse television.

So why is Google TV, the tip of the spear in Google's march into the living room, lagging behind?

Eric Schmidt made some hefty promises about the next year of Google TV. "By the summer of 2012, the majority of televisions you see in stores will have Google TV embedded in it," he said in December.

Right now, there's one integrated Google TV set on the market, the Sony Internet TV, and there are two set-top boxes. It's supposed to be the beachhead to bring Android into the living room, but only 8% of Google TV apps out there have been downloaded from Android Market. The rest came pre-installed on the device. Google TV owners aren't using the "smart part."

Thus far, Google TV has been plagued by performance and UI problems. It's even missing important video content. The YouTube experience has to be first-rate, but that's not even the platform's biggest challenge. The hardware sucks.

Logitech stopped making its Revue Google TV set-top boxes after losing more than $100 million on them. CEO Guerrino De Luca called it a "mistake of implementation of a gigantic nature."

But this month, Google asked the FCC for permission to test a secret, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth-enabled "entertainment device." It sounds like the existing Google TV products are just a beta test for Google's hardware ambitions. This year, there will be a smart TV showdown between Google's beta and Apple's "hobby".

Do you have an Internet-connected TV device? Which one(s)? Is it competing with old-fashioned TV? Share your living room tech setups in the comments.

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

Both YouTube and iTunes U are serving up huge quantities of educational content to a world already in the throes of a 50 year revolution in global education. In some ways they represent exactly the kind of education that a new world needs, too: learning that augments existing education and fosters life-long development of non-routine analytical and interactive skills. That's a recipe for good times.

Global Transformation

"During the past 50 years, the expansion of education has contributed to a fundamental transformation of societies in OECD countries," wrote the authors of this year's lengthy report Education at a Glance 2011: OECD Indicators. (500 page PDF, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development)

"In 1961, higher education was the privilege of the few, and even upper secondary education was denied to the majority of young people in many countries. Today, the great majority of the population completes secondary education, one in three young adults has a tertiary degree [Colleges, universities and polytechnics] and, in some countries, half of the population could soon hold a tertiary degree."

In other words, it's not an uneducated world gaining its first access to the information available in these free online education repositories. What's happening is augmentation of already historic global education levels.

Below: The United States used to be the most educated society in the world. That's no longer true. Click to view full size. From the OECD.

"Half a century ago, employers in the United States and Canada recruited their workforce from a pool of young adults, most of whom had high school diplomas and one in four of whom had degrees - far more than in most European and Asian countries," reports the OECD. "Today, while North American graduation rates have increased, those of some other countries have done so much faster, to the extent that the United States now shows just over the average proportion of tertiary-level graduates at age 25-34."

"First, each country has its own different processes and standards for accrediting completion of secondary or tertiary education. Second, the knowledge and skills acquired in education are by no means identical to those that enhance economic potential. And third, it has become increasingly evident that to realise human potential in today's societies and economies, lifelong learning is required, not just an initial period of formal schooling." (emphasis added)

That lifelong learning no doubt contributes to the global audience that amasses around this educational content online. For a high school teacher to be able to give their lectures not to 30 students at a time, but to 100,000 viewers around the world on YouTube has got to be a powerful opportunity. If many of those viewers are adults, so be it.

According to a presentation (10 page PDF) by Francesc Pedró, Senior Policy Analyst at the Center for Research and Information, OECD, the last 50 years have seen a dramatic change in the types of skills in demand in the workforce. A trend began, at least in the United states, as far back as 1985: demand for "routine manual skills" has held relatively steady, demand for non-routine manual skills has plummeted. Demand for routine cognitive skills climbed through 1970, then fell. What's hot? Non-routine analytic and non-routine interactive skills.

Those are things that a good YouTube or iTunes U video about world history or global ecology can help improve, your non-routine analytic and interactive skills. More than for just economic well-being, those are skills that positively impact quality of life in many ways.

Disruption

"A new phase of education change awaits the world, for those who embrace it," writes radical Canadian educator Joe Bower in a summary of last month's 2012 International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement (ICSEI) in Malmö, Sweden.

A central message of the 25th ICSEI conference was that change brings challenge but also opportunity, with the need to find new means of collaboration, participation and networking to reshape education for the shifting demands ahead. A whole range of papers and presentations from 450 delegates from over 50 countries set an optimistic tone, with strong commonality in themes of respect, trust, new power relations and moving to evaluation as joint enterprise. In presentations from Iceland to Malaysia there were common threads of renewing teacher professionalism, establishing change via collaborative networks, and emphasizing systems perspectives through linkage and understanding, rather than prescription and grading...

"The central message of ICSEI 2012 was of strong common issues facing schools and their communities in far separated contexts, with global similarities in connecting responses. A few countries stood out in stark contrast, chastising schools and denigrating teachers, seeing change not as opportunity for partners in prospect, refashioning and renewing learning, but as a threat to be sanctioned in audit prescription. But whilst those systems are shrill and close at hand, a more pervasive and positive way forward was signposted in Malmö to a new responsible professionalism, embracing complexity and change, more loosely configured in uncertainty yet promise."

Good luck, teachers of the world, keeping up with the Internet. It's great to hear that so many are embracing change, surely caused by technology, as an opportunity and not a threat.

That's the kind of life-long learning that professional development has always required but that will go on in a global context for perpetual learning with increasing access to high-quality educational content online.

That's a recipe for a very different world than the one we lived in last century.

As Reuters notes, Google reported that only about 11% of YouTube views are monetized. That's not all the revenue Google makes from YouTube, since its Universal Search features YouTube video results prominently alongside search ads. But the YouTube business is still under construction, and it's growing fast. As YouTube's reach begins to dwarf even television, the whole landscape of video content changes.

Big Content Partnerships

One way YouTube seeks to unseat television is by replacing its most important content. It's cozying up with pro sports leagues and Disney movies, and Google chairman Eric Schmidt has toured the world talking to TV execs about the future. As part of its redesign in late 2011, YouTube launched tons of original content channels.

The other piece of this arrangement is Google TV, for which Google has rather wild ambitions. At Le Web last year, Schmidt told attendees, "By the summer of 2012, the majority of televisions you see in stores will have Google TV embedded in it." That's quite a promise, but if Google can establish itself as a source of great original video content, the arrangement will be tempting for manufacturers.

Google's not moving into this space unchallenged. There's plenty of smoke surrounding rumors of Apple's plans to expand Apple TV beyond the hobby phase. iTunes is a valuable store of video content. But YouTube's importance in video cannot be overstated. Between the amateur creators that made YouTube what it is and the high-profile content deals on the table, Google has a key to the future of TV one way or another.

Social Video

Beyond the video content, YouTube can do things that TV can't. YouTube's late-2011 redesign put Google+ front and center, making one's social circles a part of watching and sharing videos. It even included prominent Facebook integration to make sure YouTube users could easily share somewhere, even if they aren't using Google+.

Google+ has lots of YouTube integration on its end as well. There's a floating YouTube search tab alongside the Google+ stream, and participants in a Hangout, the Google+ video chat service, can watch YouTube videos together. But Google+ is even a way to create YouTube content. Hangouts can be recorded and saved straight to a user's YouTube account.

YouTube's infrastructure allows Google to make even globally important, live events into social affairs. Tomorrow's State of the Union address will be broadcast live on YouTube, and then President Obama will answer questions live on the new White House Google+ page in a Hangout. Anyone can submit questions beforehand via the White House YouTube channel.

TV, as it currently stands, cannot compete with these kinds of features. YouTube, along with its integration into Google+, can reach more people in more significant ways than traditional TV can. That's not an exaggeration; by YouTube's fifth birthday in 2010, it reported "nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major U.S. television networks combined" every day. Since then, YouTube's daily audience has doubled again.

How much YouTube video do you watch per day?

YouTube has long worked with nonprofit-types to help them spread their causes and raise money. About 16,000 organizations are currently in its program for nonprofits, which gives them access to special YouTube features and support, Google says. And YouTube, the video service, is already a tremendous mouthpiece for activists.

But a new team, led by former YouTube product head Hunter Walk, is designed to integrate the notion of "doing good" into everything YouTube develops, from product features to support to broader vision. With the extra support, there's no reason YouTube shouldn't have 100,000 organizations in the program, Walk says.

Sounds good, in theory. But how will it work practically? Some examples include:

• YouTube will continue to help nonprofits in the ways it already has, plus new resources, like a how-to "Playbook Guide: YouTube for Good," which it's releasing today. This 25-page guide covers topics including "Storytelling for Causes" and "Campaigning on a Shoestring."


• Internationalizing. Right now, YouTube's nonprofit program is only available in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia. But YouTube's impact is felt around the world -- it's arguably more important in places where it's a rare source of free, unfiltered information. (On a per-capita basis, Saudi Arabia is actually the biggest consumer of YouTube content, Walk says.) Google needs to figure out how to recognize nonprofit accreditation in other countries, give them the ability to collect money, etc.


• Help match nonprofits with people who can help them make videos -- film schools, digital agencies, whoever.


• Get features built into YouTube that serve the unique needs of nonprofits. For instance: How can a video view turn into someone doing something, whether it's giving money or time or trying to call for policy change?


• An "innovation week for good" sometime in the next few months, led by YouTube Europe engineering director Oliver Heckmann, during which YouTube employees can spend the week hacking on these types of projects.

Walk has already assembled a small team within YouTube -- 10 people -- to focus on driving the project. But much of the work will be led by several times that many people within their functional teams at YouTube, Walk says. Remember, the goal is to make this part of the way YouTube does business, not a special cause.

Will it work? It's easy to get cynical or skeptical about something like this.

Is this just Google trying to make itself look good as it draws more scrutiny from governments and the tech industry? Is it really fair to expect a public company to put the planet before its profits? Is this just a sneaky way to lock more groups into the YouTube and Google ecosystems?

Google is, of course, hardly the only tech company that puts time and money toward the greater good - Apple, for instance, is holding an event tomorrow in New York focused on education.

But the fact that such a prominent Google employee - Hunter Walk - is leading the effort, and is staking some of his reputation on the project, suggests YouTube is serious here.

And for a tool that can be such a powerful mouthpiece for organizations and societies who need a louder voice, that's a development worth supporting.

Not surprisingly, the survey of 1,000 adults found that younger people were more likely to use social media than older people for healthcare purposes. Overall, nearly a third of respondents, and 50 percent of those under the age of 35, had used social media for healthcare purposes, which can range from registering a complaint to looking up informational videos on YouTube.

The PwC report concluded that social media would continue to be a factor for healthcare providers and consumers, saying that healthcare is "no longer social media's wallflower." At the same time, however, ambiguous regulations, privacy concerns and a host of other factors all limit how patients and healthcare providers use social media to make decisions.

Facebook (18 percent) was the most popular site for people searching for healthcare information, followed by YouTube (12 percent) and blogs (nine percent).

Yet social media does little to dictate which providers patients choose: just five percent of respondents said they would be swayed to choose one hospital over another because it had a social media presence, compared to the 30 percent who said they would choose a hospital based on its privacy policy.

There are still some barriers keeping big swaths of the healthcare industry on the sidelines when it comes to social media, including what the PwC study called "elusive" FDA guidelines that make it difficult for pharmaceutical companies to use the platform to connect with consumers.

The survey also touched on privacy and security concerns, noting that half of all healthcare organizations had a privacy or security breach within the past year, and the potential for breaches could increase as more companies utilize cloud computing and look for ways to share information amongst different providers.

Looking at the trends, it's clear YouTube viewers are looking for quick entertainment, music and humor. The report excluded content from major music labels, and it's still full of songs. The most viewed video was "Friday" by Rebecca Black, of course. For the year of a trillion views, the success of this weird, bad video is reassuringly YouTube-like. But YouTube began some major changes and unprecedented deals this year. What will YouTube's next Rewind be like?

For the first 11 months of the year, YouTube was still its own network. The launch of Google+ felt like a separate project. In October, Google gave users the ability to link YouTube and Google+ accounts, but that was just a new way of browsing videos.

In November, however, we caught YouTube beta testing a whole new YouTube, and it arrived on December 1. YouTube's grid had been replaced with a social stream. It's designed around channels now, and channels from your Google+ and Facebook friends are main features. This rearrangement didn't get a mention in the 2011 Rewind. Next year at this time, we'll know how YouTube's new way of presenting content affected its use.

Major Content Deals

The rearrangement of YouTube around channels sets the stage for the unveiling of the major content deals on which YouTube has been working. This year, YouTube sought deals to broadcast pro sports games and rentals of Disney movies. Google chairman Eric Schmidt has been on a world tour of TV executive get-togethers talking up the future of Google as a mainstream video platform.

As Google's top brass cut deals with media execs, it's also worth noting that Google has started discouraging file sharing in unsubtle ways.

Big Promises for Google TV

All this leads up to Schmidt's big, huge, giant promises for Google TV. This year has been smoking with rumors of Apple's big TV move, so the content platform showdown in the living room is nigh. Earlier this month, Eric Schmidt told the Le Web conference that, "By the summer of 2012, the majority of televisions you see in stores will have Google TV embedded in it."

That was a big, brave thing to say. Google's TV platform has foundered this year. As The Verge reported, the set-top box cost manufacturer Logitech "well over $100M in operating profits." Logitech CEO Guerrino De Luca called the Google TV launch "a mistake of implementation of a gigantic nature." Can Google really turn that ship around in six months?

Google shipped an important Google TV update in October that revamped the user interface and made it more interesting as an app platform. But content is still a problem for Google TV. Apple has a vast library of premium content available on Apple TV through the iTunes store. But we haven't seen the results of Google's wheelings and dealings with content providers yet.

In Google's video content strategy, YouTube is the killer app. This was a big year for the YouTube we knew, but expect major changes next year.

Here's YouTube's 2011 Rewind video:

Network administrators can turn on YouTube for Schools to give school computers access to the vast library of YouTube EDU content from partners such as the Smithsonian and TED. The content is organized into topical and grade-level playlists. You can view the lists at youtube.com/teachers.

YouTube for Schools allows unfettered access to educational videos without any of the YouTube stuff that's inappropriate for school. Schools can customize their YouTube portals with playlists and topics tailored to their curricula. And teachers can find videos arranged by topic and grade level to help them formulate lesson plans.

In 2010, Google's launch of encrypted search ran afoul of school network administrators by clashing with the Children's Internet Protection Act, a federal law that would have required schools to block Google. Google had to move encrypted search to a new, separate domain to fix the problem. With this specialized version of YouTube, it looks like Google has figured out how to better serve the needs of schools.

YouTube has run some interesting educational promotions this year, such as a contest to perform your science experiment live from space.

Read more about YouTube for Schools on the YouTube blog.

Do you think YouTube is a good educational resource?

The track was commissioned by file-sharing site Megaupload as part of a campaign to generate support for the controversial service. It features several mainstream artists, including Snoop Dogg, Kanye West and P Diddy, praising the service, which happens to be one of many thorns in the sides of major music executives everywhere.

The track should be especially embarrassing to music label executives, because it features several popular, mainstream artists endorsing a service that the RIAA and other industry groups have sought to paint as a rogue file-sharing website that hurts artists. It's exactly the sort of site UMG and similar companies would be itching to have shut down should the industry succeed in having the U.S. Congress succeed in passing some version of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

Google Wants to Fight Piracy, But Does This Go Too Far?

Google has put a renewed focus on catering to the needs of content rights holders and big media companies lately, in the hopes of cleansing its allegedly pro-piracy reputation among such players. The search giant not only wants to avoid litigation like the $1 billion lawsuit Viacom filed against it, but ultimately wants to forge better relationships with these companies as it moves towards more content-centric products. Without those relationships, initiatives like Google Music and Google TV are dead on arrival and YouTube doesn't stand a chance of competing with Netflix or Hulu, sites to which YouTube is slowly being repositioned as an alternative via premium content deals and a through, recent redesign.

One of the ways that Google has tried to assuage the concerns of rights holders is by making YouTube content takedown requests easy to execute and by responding to them more quickly.

If the allegations being made by Megaupload are true, Universal may be abusing the system YouTube has erected for reporting legitimate copyright claims and if that's the case, perhaps a revision of the process may be in order.

From instagram's departure from a check-in model (ala Foursquare), to YouTube's online video dating histories, this infographic should remind you that no matter what you are building, be ready to change directions if necessary.

On the face of it, this makes little sense. Now I can 'like' a video on YouTube and it automatically shows up on my Facebook wall and Twitter feed. That's actually very cool. It saves me having to manually share things, yet I still control the autosharing (as I have to click the 'like' button in YouTube). Indeed this is frictionless sharing the way it should be - the user is in control of what gets shared, but it's made much easier for them. So why on earth isn't Google+ part of the autosharing?

Here is how it works in YouTube as of today. Go to your YouTube settings page. To set up autosharing, check off some or all of the options in the middle column ("On connected accounts") and then connect each social network you'd like to send videos to.

To test this, I 'liked' a Noel Gallagher video. Sure enough, it automatically got published to my Facebook wall, Twitter feed and MySpace account.

There are quirks in YouTube's design - for example, after liking that video I was still prompted to share it to Facebook (see the Facebook button below the video in the screenshot above). Other than that, the process works as advertised.

So why can't I automatically send this Noel Gallagher video that I liked to Google+? If I want to show that video to my friends on Google+, I'll need to manually share it. And, as Noel himself might say, I can't be arsed doing that.

A Delicate Balance

What Google appears to be doing is trying to entice people to spend more time on YouTube, browsing videos that their friends (on G+, Facebook and more) have recommended. That certainly ties into Google's strategy of making Google+ less of a standalone social network and more the social glue over all of its products. Google doesn't want to highlight Google+ too much as a place where you can watch cool videos.

It's a delicate balance, but it comes at the cost of inconvenience to Google+ users. You have to manually share a video to Google+, a process which takes a few clicks and precious Internet minutes (admittedly a #firstworldproblem). Whereas you can share videos you like to Facebook and Twitter with a single click of a button on YouTube.

AutoSharing Rant

This has been one of the frustrating things about Google+ from the start, that you cannot autoshare things to it. On Twitter and Facebook, there are ways to share content from external services automatically. Indeed, Facebook is increasingly headed in that direction with its so-called frictionless sharing features - which admittedly may have overstepped the line between useful sharing and over sharing. But for example, on both Facebook and Twitter you can automatically share content from your blog via RSS. I think that's a good thing, because it makes it easier for people to share what they think will be of interest to their friends.

It's understandable that Google+ wants to avoid spam. OK, what people consider to be spam varies widely (one of my brothers once accused me of "spamming" him on Facebook because I autoshare the RWW posts I write). But surely autosharing a YouTube video that you like to your friends on Google+ isn't spamming. In any case, you can manually share a YouTube video on Google+. So is making that process easier really going to cause spam issues on Google+? I highly doubt it.

What do you think, should Google add its own social network - Google+ - to the autoshare options in YouTube? I vote yes, but let me know if you agree.

It might be surprising to see Facebook integration so prominently on YouTube, with Google+ is trying to make a name for itself, but think of it this way: Facebook is huge. YouTube is huge. Google+ is not yet huge. What better way for Google to introduce Facebook users to Google+?

The new YouTube got a lot of design attention. No more simple boxes on a white background. Google wants lots of eyeballs on these pages. It is realigning its media relationships and striking new content deals around the world. YouTube has been mainstream for years, but the new YouTube will redefine the term "mainstream media." Disney movies, music videos, Rebecca Black and cute puppies all make YouTube what it is, and the new design encourages users to watch and share all of it.

Read more about the redesign on the YouTube blog.

YouTube has been testing this design with a small percentage of users for several weeks. YouTube's integration with Google+ actually began in October, when Google enabled users to connect their YouTube and Google+ accounts. This brought a "Posted to Google+" tab of videos to users' YouTube homepages. But the leaked redesign takes the integration further, turning the homepage into a news feed that tracks trending and popular videos. It also emphasizes user profiles, showing Google's intentions to unify users under one Google+ identity.

In October, YouTube's design lead, Elizabeth Windram Laraki, left Google for Quora. Meanwhile, major Google properties like Gmail, Google Docs and Google Reader have gotten major redesigns to unify them with Google+ and introduce more social features. As SVP of Engineering Vic Gundotra made clear at Web 2.0 in October, Google+ represents a shift for the whole company. The leaked redesign shows that it's YouTube's turn to get the treatment.

A Google spokesperson had this to say about the redesign:

"With more videos coming to YouTube every minute we're always experimenting with ways to help users and creators more easily find, watch and share the videos that matter most to them. We're trying out this homepage on a small percentage of our total user base. As always, we'll consider rolling changes out more broadly based on user feedback on this experiment."

Thanks to Business Review USA for the great scoop!

Do you like YouTube's new emphasis on social features?

The result, titled "Life in a Day," is a 90-minute film directed by Kevin Macdonald and produced by Ridley Scott. It documents human life on Earth for one day, insofar as such a thing is possible within a span of 90 minutes. The movie, which has already premiered at a few festivals, is now available in its entirety on YouTube.

We'll leave a more in-depth critique of the film up to the movie critics, but if nothing else, it's a very interesting concept, made possibly only by digital technology and the Web.

Macdonald and Scott pieced together their creation from 4,500 hours of footage uploaded to YouTube, all of it purportedly recorded on July 24, 2010. Even six years prior, gathering that much footage from so many geographically dispersed locations would have required a huge budget, large film crew and extensive air travel.

In this case, the project was backed by a giant tech company who can afford to bring on award-winning talent to help piece the whole thing together. That ability sure made the finished product looked nice, but we can imagine a similar approach being used by amateur filmmakers, as well as budding professionals, who now have history's largest, most distributed film crew at their disposal.

"We received a request from a local law enforcement agency to remove YouTube videos of police brutality, which we did not remove. Separately, we received requests from a different local law enforcement agency for removal of videos allegedly defaming law enforcement officials. We did not comply with those requests, which we have categorized in this Report as defamation requests."

"The whole world is watching," as protesters around the country have reminded officials since they first began to occupy Wall Street. With this week's escalations, now would not be a good time for Google to engage in censorship. The wording of its notice about denying the removal requests is encouraging, but it's carefully chosen to suit a particular situation.

Google complies with 93% of U.S. removal requests. It has decided that the best course of action is to maintain transparency and respond on a case-by-case basis. That transparency has upset governments, and the refusal to censor police brutality videos surely made some city officials unhappy.

But Google's record is spotty. Just this month, it handed over a WikiLeaks volunteer's Gmail data to the U.S. government, which used an old and controversial law to request it without a warrant from a judge. Google is pushing for updated laws that better reflect the media of today, but in the meantime, its record on upholding free speech is touch-and-go. Google has done the right thing with these police takedown requests, but the world should keep watching.

What do you think Google's responsibilities are regarding government requests?