Follow Santa's Journey!

Oooh, it's almost Christmas! And that means that Santa is about to leave his digs at the North Pole to embark upon his '09 World Tour, placing presents under the trees of good little girls and boys all over the planet. Where will he be, and when will he make it to your house?

You can find the answer at www.noradsanta.org. You see, every year, NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, tracks Santa's journey from the time he lifts off from his Arctic village to his final stop in Hawaii at the end of a looooooooong night. You can join the ride at Noradsanta.org or try m.noradsanta.org if you prefer to do your Santa tracking on a mobile phone. You'll also want to subscribe to the NORAD Tracks Santa YouTube channel, which will contain videos of many of his stops around the world, all captured by NORAD's Santa Cam network.

Take a peek at the fun that ensued last year and brace yourself for 2009's merry ride: … Continue

Make Way for youtu.be Links

It's all the rage: link shorteners to ensure that those useful URLs you're sharing don't take up too much precious character count while also giving you an inkling of what you're about to click on. Well, we've just launched youtu.be as a shortener for YouTube video links -- and nothing but YouTube links -- so you can rest assured that when you see a link with this URL, you are indeed about to click on a YouTube video. (Also, because the link contains the ID of the video you're going to see, developers can do interesting things like show you thumbnails, embed the video directly, or track how a video is spreading in real-time.)

To see this feature in action, use AutoShare to link up your YouTube account to social networks like Twitter and Google Reader. Then, whenever you favorite a video on YouTube, for example, that action will get syndicated out to your network, who will see this shortened edition of the video's URL.

To use youtu.be manually, simply take a URL like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdeioVndUhs and replace the"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=" with "http://youtu.be/" to get: http://youtu.be/FdeioVndUhs Plug that shorter URL into a browser, and you'll see it redirects to that video.

Vijay Karunamurthy, Engineering Manager, recently watched "Suzy Snowflake" again, thanks to Diablo Cody. … Continue

Diablo Cody Curates Today's Homepage

Entertainment Weekly columnist Diablo Cody stopped writing for a minute (she's also a scribe on Showtime's The United States of Tara and penned Juno) to share her favorite YouTube videos with the world. Here she reveals which videos make her laugh, cry and feel all nostalgic.



"Dog and Elephant":This CBS News report never fails to make me cry. We're talking ugly,ragged sobs. It actually replaced "Christian the Lion: Reunion" as mygo-to animal weepfest.

"Valentine for Perfect Strangers":Though it's a few years old, this bizarre short is still my all-timefavorite thing on YouTube. I wish Otto had made a sequel, but perhapsit's best that he wasn't subjected to "Chocolate Rain"-styleoverexposure.

"Alternate Duck Tales Intro":Truly sick (and from a production standpoint, truly slick.) Those of uswho always suspected Scrooge McDuck was evil will be vindicated afterwatching this. Warning: disturbing content.

"Love in this Club, by the Rock-afire Explosion":If you grew up with the Showbiz Pizza Place chain in your area, youmight remember the "house band"-- a gang of animatronic singinganimals. Today, Rock-afire fan Chris Thrash reprograms the robots toplay modern club bangers. Funny and impressive.

"Suzy Snowflake":I remember watching this vintage stop-motion short on Chicago's WGNevery Christmas. I hope to show it to my kids someday. It's easy toforget that YouTube isn't just a time-suck, it's an archival tool.

For more celebrity playlists, click here.

Mia Quagliarello, Community Manager, recently watched "Norah Jones and Jimmy Kimmel Sing YouTube's 12 Days of Christmas."

Happy Solstice!

… Continue

Facebook Feeds Begin Showing Up on YouTube's Homepage

This week we've added another launch to the "social feature" list: a feed that pushes the YouTube videos your friends are embedding on Facebook back to your YouTube homepage. This feature is in test mode right now, but there is a way for you to experiment with it while it's being worked on: visit this page and connect to Facebook in the area that says "Where do I share my activities?" (If you've already hooked this up, you may need to disconnect and reconnect accounts to enable.) You can choose to "Disable AutoShare" right afterwards if you don't want your YouTube actions to be syndicated out to Facebook. But if you do want your YouTube-related Facebook activity to be syndicated back to YouTube, the key is that you just stay connected to Facebook. Alternatively, you can search for your friends using the friend finding module on the homepage, and that will also connect you to Facebook. Once hooked up, it might take a little while for videos to start appearing on your homepage during this experimental phase.

We see the YouTube homepage as only the start of your video journey. It's where you should be able to get a snapshot of the "YouTube Zeitgeist" at any moment -- that is, those videos that are most relevant to you and to the times. Sometimes those videos are served up by algorithms that offer recommendations based on your viewing history or the channels you're subscribed to. By adding the videos your friends are embedding on Facebook into the mix, we're hoping to close a loop with regards to how videos are shared and consumed these days. Take a look at these stats to see just how much YouTube content is viewed off the site:

• Facebook: 46.2 years of videos watched a day
• Orkut: 12.7 years of videos watched a day
  
• MySpace: 5.6 years of videos watched a day
• Hi5: 1.2 of years of videos watched a day

Pretty amazing, right? These kinds of numbers underscore the need for us to more tightly integrate social platforms with YouTube, because at the end of the day, we hope YouTube becomes your portal to video on the Web, particularly the social Web that has become so integral to our lives.

Chris Testa, Software Engineer, recently watched "I'm Yours(ukulele)," which his friend Jason posted into his Recent Activity via Facebook. … Continue