It is beyond value what a content publisher, advertiser, syndicator or whoever else you can think of can glean from metrics that track the behavior of viewers of video content. Here are some key items that can be “gleaned”:

• Popularity of certain videos
• Which kinds of video content retains users (e.g., short form vs. long form, ad-supported vs. free, etc)
• Abandonment of playback (e.g., when does a user call it quits on a clip)
• How is the content shared? Does a user send it to a friend, to Facebook, to a blog?

This kind of data can clearly help a variety of video content providers and advertisers target content better to their users and produce better content overall. In this space, Omniture has been leading the charge for a while now with their SiteCatalyst product suite, which includes specific video metrics. The product suite includes an API which can integrate directly into a Flash-based video player, with particularly close integration with Brightcove’s video players, and provides hooks to track the various user behaviors that can occur during video playback.

Google does not want to be left behind in this space, given that they wish to “organize the world’s information”, and have recently opened up a relatively new component of their Google Analytics to all users of that service. The Event Tracking API has now been added to all Google Analytics accounts, whereas previously it was an invite-only beta feature. This portion of their analytics API allows you to track almost arbitrary event-oriented data, without affecting the more conventional web site-oriented metrics, such as pageviews. Event Tracking really enables users of Google Analytics to leverage the platform for video tracking, allow you to define and measure user events that are important to your video content and players. Here are some examples:

• Start playback of video
• Pauses and resumes
• Skipping backwards or forwards in a clip
• Turning the volume up or down
• How far the user got before stopping or moving to another clip

But the richness this kind of event tracking doesn’t stop there. With the proliferation of RIA applications on the web, you now have the opportunity to track user behavior, beyond video playback, at a greater level of detail.

• Track search terms within Flash or Flex-based applications
• Follow navigation paths through RIA applications without incurring page views in your metrics
• Track viral features in a video player or other RIA application: blog posts & social link sharing (Delicious, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon)
• The list goes on…

Check out a great primer on using the API at the link below.

http://www.insideria.com/2009/02/using-google-analytics-within.html

As time marches on, it is becoming clearer that Google is focusing on the browser as the primary application development platform. This is evident with their release of Chrome, their first foray into the browser market which attempts to make browsing faster and more reliable, and even more clear with the more recent news that Google has managed to get Gmail to work offline, with the use of Google Gears.

While I find the ability to have a fully browser-based application running offline impressive, my first thought upon hearing such news is: why? I may be old fashioned, but I still use an actual email client to read my mail (Apple’s Mail application). I’ve been able to read my mail offline for as long as I can remember. Mail clients have been around for years (decades?) and have been admirably solving the problem of reading and writing email for a long time. I realize that web-based email simplifies the process of reading and writing email by not requiring you to have to configure an email program with the necessary settings. But what about the other issues that make it a challenge? Being a developer, my browser is always crashing (and sometimes it’s not even my fault). Flash 10 on the Mac, for example, is constantly having me reload my Firefox instance and trying to pick up where I left off. This makes the browser an undesirable place to keep my email open.

Beyond Gmail, I must say that I’ve been burned enough times in writing long form content, be it emails, or blog posts, or bug reports, you name it, that I’m cautious and reluctant to do that in a browser. I’m a keyboard shortcut guy, and on the Mac, many times the go to beginning of line, or go to end of line key commands actually force the browser to hit the back button. I’ve lost a lot of work this way (my own fault), but the key command is a system standard, and the browser breaks that. In fact, I’m writing this blog post in an offline application, to later cut and paste it into our blogging system.

I’d also put web-based instant messaging into the category of “why do we need this in browser as well”. There has been a proliferation of web-based instant messaging, with Google Talk and Facebook, which requires me to hunt down the appropriate tab in Firefox to see what people are writing to me. This makes the whole instant messaging process far less “instant”.

So while all of what I have just mentioned might make me an oddball in the Web 2.0 world, where many (most) people I know read their email in the browser and have a Facebook window open at all waking hours, I have to take a moment to realize the lesson here. If history has taught us anything, it has taught us that the most technically correct or appropriate solution is not always (or rarely is) the solution that ultimately becomes successful, or popular. Take MySpace for example. The user experience is arguably miserable, yet MySpace paved the way for large scale adoption of social networking. Just because I think that my trusty old email client, which I have been using for years, can already do what Gmail’s miraculous new offline feature can do, and better, I have to appreciate the significance to the throngs of people that use Gmail via the browser and have never looked back.

P.S.

In other Google news, I must say I was excited to find that the defunct JotSpot blogging platform, which has consumed by Google has made its way into Google Sites. I was a fan of JotSpot wikis back in the day, and Google’s transformation of the product seems like a great addition to the product line.

In other news, if you’ve ever used another one of Google’s acquisitions that goes by the name of GrandCentral, it’s coming back and I’m looking forward to see what has been done to it.

To round out the Google rumor round up, there have been hints of a Google Web Drive. This seems like a natural progression in their cloud-based computing offerings. I’m an avid user of Jungle Disk so I’m curious to see what Google can whip up.