Blogging

The fun browser add-on PicLens has incorporated YouTube and Amazon.com into the short but hopefully soon-to-grow list of supported Web sites. Compatible with Firefox on Windows and Mac, Internet Explorer, and Safari, PicLens recreates your surfing experience with a futuristic graphical display.

PicLens now supports searches on YouTube and Amazon.com.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

As Rafe talked about in February, PicLens highlights the image content of a site and allows you to whip back and forth using mouse gestures instead of conventional static browsing. If you’re familiar with how it works with an image site like Flickr, the YouTube interface is identical. The PicLens plug-in will install a grid button on your Toolbar, which you click to activate the PicLens full-screen interface. Click a thumbnail to start playing a video, while the search box lives in the upper right of your screen. As video starts playing, standard YouTube controls appear at the bottom of the video. One potential drawback is that if the quality of the video is low, then the not-quite-full-screen playback will probably appear pixelated.

On Amazon, the experience is slightly different. The main Amazon.com page doesn’t support the PicLens button, but if you click on the button anyway it will open up the PicLens UI. From there, change the Web site search to Amazon, type in your search term, and images of whatever item you searched for will zoom past. The Amazon interface responded slower than other, more heavily-image based Web sites like Picasa.

PicLens currently supports YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, MySpace, Fotobucket, deviantART, Google Images, Yahoo Images, and about a half-dozen others. The slideshow mode makes PicLens more accessible for users who are worried about the vertiginous effects of the add-on. There’s also a plug-in for WordPress users to add the feature to their site, and instructions for any webmaster to add PicLens support to their self-hosted pages.

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PicLens adds YouTube, Amazon

Online storage provider Drop.io has a cool new feature for its users today, allowing them to tap into Twitter to post updates every time they add files to one of their storage folders. Drop.io’s architecture is based around folders (called “drops”) so after plugging in your Twitter log-in to any specific drop it will broadcast changes every time files are added or removed.

What makes this feature particularly useful is that you can assign it to specific drops but not all of them at once, meaning if you want to keep some files and uploads private you don’t have to blanket that information out into the Twitter community. It also works with any file type supported by Drop.io, including messages left by phone using Drop.io’s free voice recording tool.

Users who would prefer not to use Twitter as a broadcasting service can also subscribe to alerts via SMS. You can plug in any numbers you’d like alerts sent to (per drop) and it will send out a link every time one is added. If you feel like saving your wallet from SMS charges there’s an RSS feed per drop as well.

Also new and notable is support for one of my favorite browser add-ons PicLens. If you’ve got the plug-in installed hitting the PicLens button in the top right corner of your drop will display all the files in a giant wall, which is a more more enjoyable way to parse through folders full of pictures, videos and audio.

To see a video of the Twitter integration in action you can go here. Below is a shot of what your Tweets will look like. It took about 30 seconds for it to process mine from upload to tweet, which isn’t too shoddy.

Drop.io users can now drop in their Twitter credentials and have any updates sent out to their Twitter account. This is on a per drop basis, so you can tweak certain folders to broadcast, while others don't.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Original post:
Tweet your files with Drop.io

Shashi Seth, the executive leading the effort to make money from the YouTube video-sharing site, has left Google, the company confirmed Thursday.

“Shashi was a valued member of both the Google and YouTube teams, and we wish him well in his new endeavors,” the company said in a statement. Asked about plans for his replacement, the company said, “We have a talented team leading our monetization efforts at YouTube and we are excited about the future.”

The departure was reported earlier Tuesday by Om Malik, who said Seth now is chief revenue officer of Cooliris. That Kleiner-Perkins-funded start-up is the developer of PicLens, a swoopy and dynamic browser tool to look at photos.

YouTube monetization is job No. 1 at Google, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt has declared. Google is working on new YouTube ad options, and it recently added a YouTube buzz targeting option that lets advertisers place ads on videos that are gaining fast in popularity.

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YouTube monetization chief departs