Techno Musings

Well I just read an article which stated that YouTube is now the number two search engine ahead of Yahoo. The article went into more details talking about a child who used YouTube as the research tool to find sufficient information on the platypus for a school paper. I know, I know this is old news as the information was a part of an August 2008 ComScore’s search query report. And of course that means there will most likely be an associated uptick in Google’s advertisement revenues. Further a release later on in 2008 showed that this was not merely a blip but a trend as total number of YouTube searches went from 2.5 Billion per month in the Summer to 2.72 Billion per month by the end of the year. In a somewhat related point many of my friends in Japan are hooked on YouTube whether it is on their computer or on AppleTV or even on the iPhone. (Actually at a gathering that I had at my home the biggest hit was YouTube on my AppleTV. We spent quite a bit of time looking up music videos of 80s songs, and finding almost everything we looked for.) So for all of the naysayers out there who said that Google paid too much or could not figure out how to monetize the YouTube investment, well all I can say is you were wrong.

I’m not so interested in the statistics, but what I am interested in, as usual, are musing about what this might mean and what could be extrapolated from this phenomena. Blogs, Wikis and in some sense other social media systems have all found their way into the enterprise mostly at the organizational or business unit level. Really just like how good services on the Internet become popular these tools do as well, but inside of a company. At the proverbial water cooler people hear about a internal wiki site that someone set up and ask if they can get in on the action. Pretty soon the site is large enough that the IT organization has to pay attention. I can imagine that if Google were to offer YouTube on premise it might turn into a similar kind of success. It would allow companies to federate the responsibility of content creation for activities like building training materials, giving lectures, etc. As I see it YouTube is really finally the analogue for TV on the Internet, but there is a bit of democracy involved as well.

What do you think is the next social networking platform that will find its way into the enterprise?  Also what is your new favorite social networking application?