YouTube received a more polished design yesterday that focuses the user’s attention on the channels he/she follows and adds a video feed that reminds slightly of a twitter feed. The new homepage consists of a predominating gray background, bigger video thumbnails and a cleaner video watch page.

The redesign comes with a fresh homepage that has a dedicated channel bar on the left, displaying the ones you’re subscribed to, trending, popular, music-oriented and entertainment ones, and ones that YouTube suggests to you based on your viewing activity. Read more »

Google has removed several popular peer to peer file sharing sites, including The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, 4Shared and Torrentreactor from its instant and autocomplete search. The search provider aims to prevent the distribution of pirated content with that move.

This means that you will need to type in the full name of the blacklisted sites manually for the results to come out. It’s not a complete ban, but the move should, in theory, reduce the traffic that those sites are getting. Read more »

Google’s apps for iOS so far have ranged from mediocre to downright lame. A lot of them were just the mobile versions of their mobile site with a slight redesign to fool the users into thinking they are using a proper app and not just a mobile site. But their latest Google Search app changes all that.

The redesign makes the app look completely different and unlike most of their other iOS apps, completely awesome. The best part about it is that it finally feels like a proper app and not just another tab in Safari. Read more »

It seems Google has been quietly working on a new look for YouTube. No, not Cosmic Panda; this is even newer. And before they release it officially to everyone, they want to give you a sneak peak at it. Unfortunately, this time, it isn’t as easy as clicking on a link to get the new UI but it isn’t complicated either.

So this is what you have to do. First of all, this only works best on Chrome and Firefox. On IE9 it goes back to the old look after a browser restart and on Safari and Opera it does not seem to work at all. The following are the steps to get it working on your browser. Read more »

If you thought Google does not make enough cool looking stuff, you are in for a surprise. I recently stumbled upon The ‘About’ page for Google Music and not only do I think it is the best page Google ever made it is probably one of the coolest web pages out there on the Internet.

When you open the page, you will need to give it some time to load, which could take a while depending upon your Internet connection speed. After that you will see tabs at the bottom for the various features of Google Music. Hovering over them makes a sound that goes down in octave from left to right. But the real fun starts when you click on one of them. Read more »

When Google announced their music service at the I/O conference earlier this year, it came with their famous beta tags. It only allowed you to upload up to 20,000 of your own tracks to Google’s servers and then stream it from other devices anytime you want. Today, at their ‘These Go To Eleven‘ event, Google released the final version of the Google Music service.

So what are the new features? Well, as before, you can still upload your music to Google’s servers and store it there but now you can also purchase new music. Read more »

Google is holding an event on November 16 and has sent out invites for the same. However, the invites don’t clarify what the event is actually about. All it says is that ‘These go to eleven’.

In case you don’t get the reference, it is from the movie This Is Spinal Tap and the invite is actually marked from the character in the movie: Nigel Tufnel, who says the above mentioned line. Read more »

Google is continuing to add new features to its Google+ social network as it tries to upset the Facebook dominance in the online social service realm. The search giant just announced that it’s improving the Google+ integration of two of its other popular products – the YouTube video sharing service and the Chrome browser.

You’ll notice a new YouTube button at the top right of your Google+ page. Once you move your mouse over it a search field will pop up and you can look for a video to play. The video itself plays in a pop-up window, but you get the controls for it right on the Google+ page so you don’t need to switch tabs all the time. Read more »

It appears that the Android Market is going to grow another checkout option. The PayPal support that we’ve been hearing about for quite some time now is finally going to land in Android’s official app repository.

The evidence for this was found in the source code of the latest Android Market app, which repeatedly mentions PayPal. And if the code is already there we guess Google will be putting it to use quite soon. Read more »

Apple has their iTunes, Microsoft has Zune, Google has Music Beta. What does RIM have? Well, so far the answer was ‘nothing’. But RIM has now launched their BBM Music service to the masses and the beta version can be downloaded right now.

In case you don’t know about it, this is how it works. As a new user, you get a limited time premium subscription. After that you can choose to continue using the service as a premium user by paying $4.99 per month ($4.99 CDN, $5.99 AUD) or you can choose to go with the free subscription service. The difference between the two is that with the former you can stream entire tracks whereas with the latter you can only listen to 30 second song previews. Read more »

Google has updated the user interface of Gmail, making the popular email service even more attractive. The new UI design adds contacts images to your conversation so you can easily identify the sender of each message and lets you choose the spacing between the elements on the screen.

That makes it easy to customize Gmail for different screen sizes and resolutions. The Gmail devs have also collaborated with iStockphoto and have created new HD themes, if you are into that kind of stuff. Read more »

Microsoft has announced a special version of the popular Firefox browser that comes with the Bing search engine. As you might guess, this version of Firefox changes the default search engine and homepage from Google to Bing.

For Mozilla, this will serve as another form of revenue. For Microsoft, this move will help boost the user base for Bing. With two of the world’s most popular web browsers using Bing as their default search engines, this could help accelerate Microsoft’s plans to take over Google as the most popular search engine. Read more »

The unpopular Google TV is back for another round with some new tricks up its sleeve. Launched exactly a year ago, Google TV failed to get the attention of buyers due to its many limitations, some of which Google intends to address in this update.

For starters, Google TV has now been updated to Android 3.1 Honeycomb. We would have praised it for running the latest version of Android had it launched a couple of weeks ago but that is no longer the case. Read more »

The team over at Mashable have manage to aggregate a wealth of impressive stats all centered around a little social networking site you might have heard of called Facebook.

With an estimated 800 million users, it’s safe to say that reading this, you might fit under Mark Zuckerberg’s broad umbrella of a user base too. Read more »

It’s taken just under five months, but for the biggest acquisition in the company’s history, Microsoft’s 8.5 billion dollar deal has finally gotten the green light.

Skype Technologies SA was previously under split ownership, with eBay buying up 30% of the company in 2005 and the remainder spread amongst tech investors. Read more »