YouTube's Tape Mode Easter Egg

YouTube's player added a "tape mode" button for many videos to celebrate "the 57th birthday of the first commercially available video recorder". The tape mode uses some VHS-like effects that add noise, distortion, pixel blocks, video compression artifacts. If you press the "pause" button, you'll see a shaking effect that simulates what happened when a VHS tape was paused.

To try this feature, you can add "&vhs=1" to the URL of a YouTube video, like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2XmymhCdHU&vhs=1.

{ Thanks, Sterling. }

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Google's Inactive Account Manager

Google has recently added a feature that lets you decide what happens when you no longer use your account. It's called Inactive Account Manager and the goal was to offer a feature that tells Google "what you want done with your digital assets when you die or can no longer use your account".

You need to set a timeout period (3/6/9/12 months), add your phone number and contact details for up to 10 trusted friends or family members (email addresses and phone numbers), then decide if you want to share Google Takeout for services like Blogger, Picasa Web Albums, YouTube with those people and delete your account once it's inactive. Google will alert you one month before the timeout period expires.

It's a feature that seems to be useful if you want Google to automatically delete your account when you're no longer alive and share some data with the people you trust. Unfortunately, not all the Google Takeout data is easy to use. YouTube videos, Picasa photos, Drive files and Gmail's contact files are easy to open, but the data from Google+, Blogger, Reader is more difficult to read. When you set up this feature, you can pick the services you want.

You can also use the Inactive Account Manager just to notify friends and family members that you no longer use that account or to send an automated response to all incoming Gmail messages once your account becomes inactive.

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Google Mobile Search Tests Sub-sitelinks

Google's mobile search site experiments with a different interface for sitelinks. The updated version hides the snippets for sitelinks and lets you expand lists of sub-sitelinks. Instead of only listing the most important sections of a site, Google's new features also shows some popular subsections.

"The links shown below some of Google's search results, called sitelinks, are meant to help users navigate your site. Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they're looking for," explains Google.

Here's the new interface:

... and here's what happens when you expand a sitelink:

Another example:

This is the regular mobile UI:

Google mentioned a similar feature for the desktop site last year: "this improvement digs deeper into megasitelinks by showing sub-sitelinks instead of the normal snippet." I haven't noticed this feature and it doesn't seem to be available in the desktop interface.

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Reduce Data Usage in Chrome for Android

The latest release of Chrome Beta for Android added an interface for the data compression proxy. You no longer have to enable a flag, just open Chrome's menu, go to the settings, select "Bandwidth management", "Reduce data usage" and enable the feature.

You can start visiting your favorite sites and check back the "Bandwidth management" to see some stats. For more detailed stats, type chrome://net-internals in the omnibox and select the "Bandwidth" section in the left sidebar.

My total savings percentage is 33.5%. It's less impressive than Opera Mini's 90% savings percentage, but Opera Mini is not a browser. It's just a thin client app and all the rendering and JavaScript processing is performed on Opera's servers, so Opera Mini only needs a simplified OBML file. It's more appropriate to compare Chrome's data compression proxy with Opera Turbo, a feature available in the Opera Mobile browser. "In November 2009, the average compression rate for Opera Turbo was 63.6%," according to an Opera report [PDF], while in April 2011 the average compression rate was 60.5%. Apparently, Opera incorrectly defines compression rate as the savings percentage. An explanation for Opera's better performance could be that Chrome is more likely to load mobile pages than Opera Mobile, which usually loads desktop sites. Mobile pages are already optimized, so there's not much to compress.

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New Gmail Keyboard Shortcuts

Here are some new Gmail keyboard shortcuts:

d - open a compose window in a new tab (Shift+c opens it in a new window)

, - moves the cursor to the first button in your Gmail toolbar

{ - archives the current conversation and moves to the older one

} - archives the current conversation and moves to the next one.

There are some subtle differences between [ ("Removes the current view's label from your conversation and moves to the older one") and { ("Archives the current conversation and moves to the older one") or between ] and }. Their effect is identical when you read conversations from your inbox. If you open a conversation from any other label, [ will remove that label from the conversation, while { will remove the conversation from the inbox.

The Gmail shortcuts page has been recently changed and these are the new shortcuts I've noticed.

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Google Tests a New Homepage Footer

Google tests a new interface for the homepage's footer. It includes a cookie disclaimer required by a European Union directive and a settings menu similar to one that's available on Google's search results pages.

"Cookies help us deliver our services. By using our services, you agree to our use of cookies," informs Google and links to this page. Many sites have annoying cookie warnings and I'm sure that most people ignore them, so the EU directive was a bad idea.

{ Thanks, Florian. }

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A Bogus DMCA Takedown Request

Google has recently sent an email which informed me that "Blogger has been notified, according to the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that certain content in your blog is alleged to infringe upon the copyrights of others. As a result, we have reset the post(s) to 'draft' status."

Apparently, this is the infringing post: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/02/lyrics-for-youtube-music-videos.html (Google Cache). It's a post about a Greasemonkey script that allowed you to show music lyrics in the YouTube interface.

I was curios to read the DMCA complaint, but Google doesn't send it. Instead, it uploads the document to ChillingEffects and suggests to use this page to find it. Unfortunately, the ChillingEffects search feature doesn't work, so you have to use Google's site operator to search for [site:chillingeffects.org domainname.com].

I've managed to find the DMCA notice: "The URL listed below is one of nearly 20 song lyrics sites who have attempted to post lyrics for the song titled 'Alden Howell' by the artist Inspection 12. The lyrics posted on this and other sites are not accurate and the artist has not given them permission to post lyrical content. Inspection 12 has been making efforts to contact these websites directly in order to have the content removed. We are attempting to have this URL and others like it to be excluded from google search results for the name 'Alden Howell'."

Unfortunately for Inspection 12, that blog post doesn't include their lyrics. In fact, it only includes a screenshot with lyrics from a much more popular punk band. Inspection 12 has never contacted me and no post from this blog mentions 'Alden Howell' (except for this post, obviously).

Google has a counter-notification form. "The administrator of an affected site or the provider of affected content may make a counter notification pursuant to sections 512(g)(2) and (3) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or other applicable law. When we receive a counter notification, we may reinstate the material in question," mentions Google.

Update: Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.

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