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Google’s YouTube has finally entered the social media stream with the addition of a new feature that allows users to share their videos on Facebook, Google Reader, and Twitter. This is for those who upload videos to YouTube and goes along with the already ubiquitous share button.

Most users are just saying “gee, it’s about time, YouTube.” The release of this new feature was added with little fanfare, but it immediately got some attention around the Web. I learned about it through a tweet from my own stream.

It’s obvious that YouTube probably has this sharing in the works for the “favorites” and may be working towards a FriendFeed-style feed to go with Google Reader. This could mean trouble for startups like TwitVid, which allow for video sharing directly to your Twitter stream.

TwitVid, however, still has the advantage of allowing commentary alongside the video built-in (so your tweet has comments plus the video link) and it publishes nearly immediately. YouTube still has a long lag before the tweet and Facebook updates actually take place—ten to fifteen minutes, generally.

In my opinion, this is a nice little addition to YouTube, but probably is a bit “too little, too late.” There are already so many easier ways to share YouTube videos that I doubt this will get a lot of play. It’s still just as easy to send a tweet with a shortened URL as it is to have it sent automatically in this way. Faster too, generally.

Most in the industry suspect that Google is about ready to quit neglecting YouTube and may have some things up their sleeve for release soon. Google doesn’t generally sit on their haunches and they wouldn’t acquire something as huge as YouTube, shut down their own Google Video service, and then just sit around and look at YouTube wondering what to do with it.

That’s Microsoft’s job. Haha

Since we’ve been doing so much about Twitter lately, it was time for Rev2 to have a good look at the most popular of Twitter apps: online photo services. Two things Twitter doesn’t supply are photo embedding and hosting.

With the ever-growing field of Twitter apps attempting to fill in the gaps that Twitter leaves open, it’s sometimes hard to figure out what to use and why. Especially with photo hosting apps targeted at the tweet stream. We’ve narrowed the field down to five great apps you’ll want to look at.

Our list is narrowed by popularity and functionality. Not all picture sharing apps are the same, of course, and not everyone needs the same services. You might be a Twitter-only picture sharing type, so you have no need for extras like Facebook and Flickr integration. Or you might be a social media junkie that needs everything all in one. Plus an iPhone app. And geo-tagging.

We’re listing them first by simplicity, so the basic Twitter-cific apps are first, then the more integrated apps for wider usage are next.

US Airways in Hudson River - the pic that made Twitpic famous

Twitpic (twitpic.com)
This one has to be at the top of the “best of” Twitter picture app lists because of its huge userbase. It’s safe to say that most pictures shared on Twitter are shared through Twitpic. It’s absurdly easy to use, has famous people using it like Grant from Mythbusters, and integrates with cell phone uploads. It also allows others to look at photos, comment, and have those comments tweeted. Easy, fun, and quick.

Twitgoo (twitgoo.com)
“What’re you lookin’ at?” This site’s tagline sums it up. It’s a simple photo sharing app, but it integrates with most of the popular third party apps for tweeting and is especially popular amongst Mac users because of its integration with the Tweetie app.

Yfrog (yfrog.com)
Holy simple, Batman! This site, of all those on our list, is probably the simplest, most straight-forward of the photo sharing apps for Twitter. It does one thing: put up photos for twits. That’s it. Of course, it’s from ImageShack and everything they make is as simple and single-minded as it can get. Many of us are amazed that this service isn’t higher on the popularity list.

TweetPhoto (tweetphoto.com)
It’s name is what it is, but it’s also more. This is the first on our list of “integrate them all” apps for photo sharing. It does everything but burn a family CD for Christmas. You can ad geo-tagging, favorite your friends’ photos, share on Facebook, look at viewing stats for pics, and more. This is the not the most complicated photo sharing app for Twitter, but it’s up there.

Pikchur (pikchur.com)
After losing the third grade spelling bee, the makers of this app got famous by building Pikchur LOL, just kidding guys. This is the multi-platform app of photo apps. You can share with pretty much every social networking site out there using this one. It integrates with Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, Tumblr, Flickr, and others. You don’t even have to sign up, you can just upload a photo and grab a link to it for a one-off if you want. Of all those on our list, this is the most feature-rich and useful, but it’s nowhere near the top in usage. The company really seems to grasp the market and seems to be poised to make a run at the other more known used sites.

That should narrow down your search some. Twitpic remains the leader in popularity, but some of these others are gaining ground as their usefulness begins to catch on. There’s a rumor that Flickr will be adding Twitter functionality as a built-in soon, but it’s just a rumor, so take it for what it’s worth.

Here is a new post-modern twist on a popular idiom:

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then the scholarly path that earnest researchers take while stumbling upon “2 girls 1 cup” is paved with domain name liberalization.

We think that makes sense.

OK, ok, maybe we’re crying wolf. But when the green light flashes on the new domain feeding frenzy, the old whitehouse.com vs. whitehouse.gov debacle may look like a footnote in the domain name confusion manifesto.

Here is what we’re talking about: Beginning shortly, companies and municipalities will be able to purchase domain suffixes in place of “.com.” It opens up tons of potential Web real estate, especially for the frustrated Springfields and Main Street Realities of the world. There are a lot of them.

Of course, several questions loom. For example, if this even a good idea? A widely circulating survey conducted by Future Laboratory and Gandi.net suggests the answer may be “no,” as 65 percent of the 1,000 respondents stated that opening up the domain market will litter the Web with “pointless domain names.” (Obviously, they’ve never visited perezhilton.com)

The other question is who will – or should – steer the effort? After all, companies can gain potentially powerful (and profitable) new domains for $185,000 – a mighty sum for mom and pop shops but a drop in the bucket for even mid-size companies. Only 18 percent of Future Laboratory/Gandi.net thinks ICANN should make the rules, while 13 percent thinks the government should run the show and 10 percent think it should be a truly democratic free-for-all – this is the crowd that owns “Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome” on VHS.

The liberalization movement has the potential to clog up courts, inspire a new wave of vengeful hackers and even cost slow companies millions. But that’s a worst possible scenario. It could also make things right. After all, what cyber squatter had $200,000 of pocket change jingling in his pocket? If anything, I see mammoth entities keeping their traditional URLs and purchasing the new suffixes simply as a defensive move.

As savvy ‘Net denizens and online matchstick men await the fallout of domain name liberalization, we can continue to argue over exactly what will happen, but we can all surely agree on one thing that is coming: More awful GoDaddy.com Super Bowl Commercials. Ugh.

In our final installment in this series looking at Twitter clients, we’re going to look at tweeting from the Linux desktop. Since there is more than one desktop for Linux, we’ll have four instead of the three each we’ve looked at for Windows and Mac up to this point.

While the Linux platform for personal computing isn’t as common as Windows or Mac, it has a strong corps of users and a relatively large showing on Twitter. Most of these Twitter apps, like the majority of Linux apps, are open-source and free. The four clients we’ll be looking at are: gTwitter, Qt Twitter Linux, Spaz, and Twitux.

Gtwitter (code.google.com/p/gtwitter/ )
This is a GTK+-based app that has basic Twitter functions and not much more. What it lacks in tweeting, it makes up for in extreme customization. This client can be changed in just about every way it looks and acts. Refresh rates, display options, and more are all easily controlled through GTK+. This has made it the most popular client on the GTK+ desktop.

Qt Twitter Linux (kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=77375)
This client is for the KDE desktop and was obviously developed using Qt. It’s a bare bones Twitter interface and doesn’t do anything beyond what you can easily do from the Twitter website. What it does do is function quickly (it’s a direct API app), and reliably. This is the simplest and (somehow) most popular of the KDE apps for Twitter.

Spaz (funkatron.com/spaz/)
This is easily the slickest of the clients on our list and definitely the most popular. It’s a cross-platform app with Windows and Mac versions as well as support for most Linux desktops. Spaz is an Adobe Air app and is the most robust and feature-rich of the clients on this list. Very slick and functional, Spaz won an award at the AIR Developer Derby in 2008.  An important thing to note with this app is that if you dual-boot operating systems, if it’s installed on both it carries over one to the other as the data files are shared.

Twitux (live.gnome.org/DanielMorales/Twitux)
This client is for the popular GNOME desktop. It’s features cover the basics for Twitter use with timeline and friend notifications, a system tray icon, and a clean, easily-used interface. This client has become very popular on the GNOME desktop and receives regular updates.

Before we go, a final quick look at jibjib has to be given. This little portable J2ME app work in just about every Linux interface, but is technically a “mobile” app made for Java-enabled phones and devices. Very nicely done and at only 30kb.

Of all the desktop platforms we looked at, the Linux platform is the one seeing the most new apps and changes. Like with the Mac, these apps are aiming at being Twitter-specific and aren’t often branching out to other social networking sites. Unlike the other two desktops, though, in the Linux ‘verse, if you don’t see what you want, wait a week and it’ll probably be available on your favorite open source site.

Update: It didn’t take a week, as several of you asked us to look at Gwibber.  It wasn’t included in our testing because it was lower in user-base than the rest, but it’s apparently popular with our readers.  It’s definitely a nice one.

Gwibber (ohloh.net/p/gwibber)
This is a GNOME app that has a small, but loyal following. It supports multiple social networking sites: Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, etc.  It’s a nice, straight-forward app with more functionality than you generally find in small Linux applications like this.  Fast, functional, and clean, this is an open-source product that continues to see fast development.

We’ve looked at Windows clients for Twitter, so now it’s time to look at what’s available for the Mac. These are desktop clients, not browser plug-ins or mobile apps, though one or two of these will work on the iPhone or have an iPhone version.

Again, we’re looking at popular apps that have a relatively large following and are the subject of regular commentary on the Web and through Twitter. We’ve narrowed the field down to three, plus one that’s also available on other platforms and was covered in our last Windows installment.

These three clients are: Syrinx, Tweetie, and Twitterific. TweetDeck is also available on the Mac, but was covered in our Windows review of Twitter apps and is fundamentally the same on the Mac.

Syrinx (mrrsoftware.com/MRRSoftware/Syrinx.html)
This app shares its name with the pan pipes, an asteroid, and a Greek nymph. Those pan pipes are the client’s icon. This is a very simple, clean interfaced client with a lot of features. Bookmarking tweets, robust searches, and the extremely useful “pause” feature are favorites amongst users. This app has an active core userbase, though it is the least popular of the three on our list.

Tweetie (atebits.com)
This client is extremely simple and very easy to use. It’s one of the more popular Twitter apps for the Mac for this very reason. It’s also available for the iPhone. It features some great little bonuses such as threading, multiple account access, and a very clean user interface. It supports itself through ads, but can be upgraded to an ad-free version for less than $20.

Twitterific (iconfactory.com/software/twitterrific)
Like Tweetie, this client is also ad-supported, but an ad-free version is available for about $15. This might be the most popular Twitter app for the Mac, and there’s good reason for that. It’s simple, clean, and supports a lot of keyboard shortcuts. It also tracks what you have and haven’t read in your tweet stream, so unread tweets are highlighted.

There are many other Twitter apps for the Mac, but most of them are not full applications and many are just expansions of the basic Twitter website. By and large, though, the Twitter apps for the Mac are not following the “all in one” trend that PC apps are using to combine social networking sites.

Our final installment in this series will look at Twitter apps for the Linux platform.

Update: Because you asked, we’re delivering.  Here is our look at Nambu for the Mac.

Nambu (nambu.com)
This app will eventually support FriendFeed, Ping.fm and so forth, but currently supports only Twitter. Nambu is a beta app with a small, but growing following.  It’s strongest point, by far, are the multiple views that users can choose from, making their way to using Twitter unique to them. It also allows reply threading (optional), which is nice, though it can be confusing since it doesn’t alter the timeline, so replies appear twice.

This is the first in a 3-part series where we’ll look at Twitter clients that enhance and simplify (or at least attempt to enhance and simplify) the Twitter platform. Twitter has become a real online phenomenon and the many uses for it have made the field of Twitter app clients quite heavy with contenders.

For this matchup, we’re looking at Windows (PC) clients. We’ve narrowed the field to those which are fairly commonly mentioned in Google and by Twitter users themselves. That narrowed the number of apps down considerably, so for Windows, we’re looking at three: Digsby, Seesmic, and TweetDeck.

Digsby (digsby.com)
This client is hyped as an instant messaging client, integrating Facebook chat, Skype, and other popular chat clients. It also accesses the Twitter API as a non-intrusive client. It’s a good choice for those who use a lot of IM and treat Twitter as just another IM app. There aren’t a lot of “extras” or big features with Digsby, but it’s a popular app just the same.

Seesmic Desktop (desktop.seesmic.com)
Hard to pronounce, but very powerful, this app has become the app of choice for a lot of Twitter users. It integrates all of your social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, etc.) into one app and allows for multiple accounts on each. For many, especially marketers or those who use one of their Twitter account as a glorified RSS feed, this is a big boon. This app appeared out of nowhere and gained a huge number of users and notoriety almost immediately.

TweetDeck (tweetdeck.com)
In the world of Twitter apps, this is the “venerable old standby.” It and Seesmic are very similar, though Seesmic does have some advanced (multi-account) uses that TweetDeck doesn’t. For those with only one account on most of their social sites, though, TweetDeck is still a great choice. Most users will find that their decision comes down to a user interface and speedy-use preference. TweetDeck, for many, is easier to use and runs faster than Seesmic.  However in the recent days our TweetDeck messages have been extremely delay, which leads me to believe they are not able to keep up with their growth.

Before anyone gets too angry, these are all clients and not plugins or Web-based apps. I will mention that we left out Twhirl because that is owned by Seesmic and is frankly not as useful or popular as any of the other three on our list here.

Overall, there is a lot going on in social networking, especially at Twitter. It appears that clients that don’t cater to more than one social site are doomed to fail, so expect the hyper-integration trend to continue.

Watch for our coming looks at Twitter apps for the Mac and Linux platforms.