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YouTube launched five years ago yesterday and was acquired by Google 3-1/2 years ago.  Sunday marked not only the video streaming site’s fifth birthday, but also another huge milestone.  YouTube now streams over two billion views per day – almost double the prime-time audience of all three major U.S. television networks combined.

If there was any doubt about YouTube being King of Video, it should be dispelled now.

To celebrate their fifth year, YouTube has launched a new channel of videos called My YouTube Story which features people around the world talking about how the video streaming service has changed their lives.  These are plotted on a Google Map and the first set of clips for the channel were filmed by documentary filmmaker Stpehen Higgins.

Here are some stats, according to Google, for YouTube’s prominence:

• 2 billion views per day
• 3rd most-visited website (according to Alexa)
• Localized in 23 countries and 24 languages
• 15 minutes is the average user’s visit time per day
• 24 hours of video uploaded every minute
• 45 million home page impressions daily
• 70% of traffic is non-U.S.
• It would take you 1700 years to watch the hundreds of millions of videos now on YouTube.

Two separate reports released this week appear to indicate that the U.S. online advertising business is experiencing some degree of growth. According to ComScore the total number of impressions for U.S. online display advertising reached 1.1 trillion in Q1 of 2010 which is a 15% increase on Q1 2009. The ComScore report says that the average price per 1,000 impressions was around $2,48 with a total spending of $2.7bn for the first quarter of 2010.

Separately PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Internet Advertising Bureau says that internet advertising expenditure for Q1 2010 reached $5.9bn, an increase of 7.5% over Q1 2009. According to the joint report the figure for Q1 2010 is a record for the first quarter. However, the number for Q1 2010 is much lower than that for Q4 2009 which was at $6.3bn.

The apparently conflicting numbers do align in one respect – online advertising expenditure is on the way up, if not by much. The drop in expenditure during the worst of the recession seems to have stopped as companies again extend their marketing budgets.

Some interesting statistics were included in the reports. For one, ComScore claims that their latest figures show that Facebook was ahead of Yahoo in terms of banner ad impressions, displaying more banner ads to its users than Yahoo. Facebook had a gigantic 176 billion ad impressions, 16.2% of the market, as opposed to Yahoo with 132 billion impressions… a mere 12.1% of the market. Clearly, the ability to keep users on your website for extended periods has unavoidable benefits.

Facebook has called an emergency company-wide meeting to talk about their privacy policies, after weeks of criticism of Facebook by civil liberty groups, European MEP’s and US Senators. There have been calls to relinquish the control of data and to give it back to users after the new Facebook Connect API service was rolled out. Facebook Connect enables members to log on to other services with their Facebook Identity rivalling other open source OAuth services.

With a privacy policy longer than the US constitution and with over 170 permutations, it’s not surprising that concerned netizens may be looking for an alternative. Enter Diaspora.

Diaspora, a company started by students from New York University, aims to be the open source decentralised social network of the future. A bold claim made by many in the past – so what’s the difference? For starters, the young upstarts have raised almost $10,000 in seed funds on Kickstarter – with most donations around the $20 mark; it’s fair to say that it has strong grass root support.
Diaspora believes that social networking and privacy can live hand in hand. In Diaspora’s network, everyone can install their own “seed” which can be a personal web server or other cloud-based home containing personal media eg. photos, videos and everything else. This seed is made available to other networks whilst remaining under the owner’s control.

Facebook works because of its critical mass and the lucrative revenue from serving relevant advertising. Whether Diaspora gathers enough momentum after being released remains to be seen, but Facebook better watch out.

You know what it’s like. You are driving through a beautiful area of countryside. Your passengers are all soaking up the wonderful scenery. Every now and then you hear a “Ooh; look at that …” or “Wow, just look at the cloud formation over the hill-tops” but you can’t look because you are engaged in that old juggling trick of driving and map-reading all at the same time. Not to mention the time lost when you first arrived whilst you raised a second mortgage to enable you to buy all the different Ordnance Survey maps that are needed (why are you never in an area entirely covered by just one single map?) and then managed to find a shop which actually sells them.

There are indeed some beautifully stunning areas throughout the Emerald Isle, and the volume of traffic is light. Motorways are few and far between, and many of the main routes which criss-cross the country are comparatively slow, so there is a great opportunity for you to enjoy the scenery as you drive – providing that you do not have to check which page of the road atlas you should be on, or struggle with the opened-up folded map you are trying to follow.

Well fear not! Technology is here to ease your burden, and there are a number of ways you can utilise it to make your Ireland driving experience more enjoyable than ever before.

The simplest is probably to download Google maps and directions onto an i-phone, using their ‘Maps & Compass’ app. It allows you to specify if you are walking or driving, and shows a map with the route highlighted, or a page with a route listed on it. It’s a free app.

For anyone with an Android based smart phone, there is a fully functional and free ‘turn-by-turn’ navigation system available. The engine is Google Maps Navigation and it is reported to work really well.

Google have recently announced that a full-function version of Google Maps Navigation will soon be available for smart phones, but have not confirmed which ‘phones might be included in the roll-out. There is strong speculation that the i-phone will be included. However, neither Google or Apple are confirming anything publicly; no doubt the Android – v – Apple war needs to end first.

Tom-tom and Garmin are two high volume suppliers of classic ‘turn-by-turn’ nav systems in Ireland. As stand alone systems which can be taken from vehicle to vehicle they are very flexible, and fairly cost-effective. Wherever you are travelling from for your trip to Ireland, you can probably bring one of these with you – just make sure you have downloaded the Ireland maps onto them before you leave home! The very occasional mis-direction along a too-small road just adds to the adventure of your trip.

Most travellers will hire a car, and typing ‘car hire Ireland’ into your search engine will bring up a good deal of choice. It is worth choosing cars with a built-in sat nav, which is generally easier to use than stand alone systems, and do not offer a target to the opportunist thief.

Facebook is implementing location-based functions.  This is clear by the code on their touch.Facebook.com site.  In fact, the launch of this new set of features is probably imminent, given the language of the release information on that site.  The page focuses on marketing (and the new feature’s lack thereof), but the fact that Facebook’s new location-based functions are about to launch is made obvious.

Over at TechCrunch, MG Siegler broke down what the code is doing (or will be doing, once launched).  A new tab will be implemented, called the Places Tab, and it will begin allowing you to use your mobile to connect with Facebook’s mobile site and include geo-location information with your posts.  All based on where you are now – ala Foursquare and Gowalla.

Using HTML5, which has geo-loc built in, Facebook will find your general location and bring up known locations in the immediate area.  The user can then choose one and “check in” as being there.

Facebook appears to also be either planning to (somehow) get or have a setup for the future to use other information such as altitude, heading, and speed.  Those may or may not be useful later.  So-called “drive-by check-ins” on Foursquare are common, so this may be a way of combating that.

It appears that Facebook is not going with the Twitter model of just geo-tagging status updates, but instead is going with full check-in functionality and possibly a more Gowalla/Foursquare-like setup.

Very interesting stuff.  Watch for FB to announce this as a live launch in the near future.

Microsoft’s Future Social Experience Labs is trying something that has proven difficult to do: aggregate volumes of social media into one spot. Lili Cheng, general manager of FUSE labs unveiled the tool at the Web 2.0 Expo earlier this week calling it – rightly – ‘the impossible project’. The new tool will launch an aggregation of social data to an extent that is not usually found in social network feed dashboards such as TweetDeck or Seesmic, as Spindex handles Facebook and Twitter as well as RSS, Evernote and Microsoft’s own Bing.

On the official Microsoft blog Cheng wrote that today’s social networks are powerful and compelling, but they are just the beginning of a broader transformation of the web. Cheng says that one area Fuse labs have focused on is the personalisation of social computing and that they would like to help you get exposed to the right information at the right time in a meaningful way. The challenge social media aggregation projects face are numerous, including the fact that the number of platforms individuals use has been shrinking and that it is mostly early adopters who end up with profiles on numerous platforms that truly need this level of integration.

Fuse labs was started last fall to study the emerging social experiences appearing on the web and to try and inform Microsoft’s approach to how we will work and play in the future, as the company tries to keep up with the latest in Web 2.0 technologies. Spindex is currently in technical preview and is only available to attendees of the Web 2.0 Expo.