How would we possibly be able to boycott Google?

I never really thought about this before, but a google-less scenario is impossible to imagine. It’s like as being internet free but still having to somehow be online (but let’s leave AOL out of this for now). Google’s services are everywhere. Not just with search, but maps, document creation, web site traffic analytics,… internet “waving.” If you were to remove all of that, what would you replace it with? How would you find them?

Searching — lots of options, both country AND western. Google pretty much trounced everyone else in the search engine wars. Yahoo! came out of it mostly intact. Bing is the MSN Search replacement.

AdSense — the market is still open for getting ads to display on your site for revenue. Project Wonderful and VideoEgg are two that come to mind.

Base — a free market place to post your wares? I suppose ebay comes close, but you have to use their transaction system, and NextTag is expensive with terrible support (from my experience).

Checkout — late in the game and never really stood up stood up to PayPal.

Documents — I’m writing this on Zoho Writer. It looks strangely like Google’s version, but still has that remember-why-you-hate-Word feeling.

Gmail — Both Yahoo and Hotmail/Livemail are free and still very popular. Both have instant messaging too.

Picasa — Flickr is far better in my opinion. Facebook already outnumbers them both. These days, all my pics are by phone and go to TwitPic.

Maps — Bing and Yahoo are still in the game. They seem to offer web site embedding as well. MapQuest anyone? Actually, Bing Maps’ interface is very slick, even with the Segoe font type. I’m just worried that there will come a time when it’ll make me install Silverlight.

Reader — I made the switch to Google Reader a few years ago. I was a true believe in NetNewsWire, but Reader was totally online, looked great on my iPhone too. Turns out that NetNewsWire (at least for the iPhone) syncs with Google Reader instead of NewsGator. Does anyone use My Yahoo anymore?

YouTube — Vimeo? YouTube enjoys more than 40% market share of all online video. That’s not a lot, but when you consider the some 60 other video services fighting over the remainder, there is no clear competitor. That doesn’t mean that YouTube is better in service, quality playback or content for that matter.

So, not all of them are leaders, but at this point, I don’t think anyone can fully get along without Google. They have integrated themselves into so many facets of the internet simply by doing one thing, doing it extremely well, and for free.

Nobody is willing to roll their own Flickr or YouTube and take on the burden of traffic and maintenance. These are services that we expect. But our ability to use them is completely on their terms.

“We hold these companies to a higher standard. But, hey, they’re the ones who set it.” -Zeldman

Putting this together was a lot of fun. With internet video content rising well beyond YouTube, I had many examples of what people expect from a media web site. Plus, I got to work in a little bit of html5 semantics.

Go watch The Variants promos and laugh, laugh and laugh.

Seriously, if YouTube accepts .wmv, .avi, .mkv, .mov, .mpeg, .mp4, .flv, .ogg, 3gp and outputs to multiple .flv, mp4, 3gp… OMG, why then is the link I just tapped not available?

I understand that once uploaded, videos take time to convert for display. Having uploaded some from my own iMovie library, waiting for YouTube to do its magic without a progress bar is torture. But once it’s done and properly playing on the website, the video still has to become available for HD (if available), mobile, etc.

As we become more connected on more networks on new devices, our content experience should become more homogeneous. Websites should get closer to looking the same on our desktop computers as they do our mobile devices. Instead, because of mobile phones and netbooks (more specifically, their wireless connectivity) web designers, who once enjoyed building for higher display resolutions and bigger bandwidth, find themselves thrown back into building sites that are “dial-up” friendly. It’s a whole new browser war sans Netscape Navigator.

Which brings me back to YouTube on the iPhone. Video codec H.264, briefly put, is designed for both high-def and small bandwidth playback. Since YouTube offers multiple versions of the same video, it has to take the original video upload and convert it several times. And since the only way to view YouTube on Apple TV or the iPhone is with h.264, YouTube needs to make additional conversions/transcodings.

In the end, content for the web isn’t just for the browser. It includes phones, game consoles, dvr (TiVo), and any future devices we don’t yet know we need. And all of them need the same content in their own specific formats.

All of this means that the next time I see something along the lines of “@amboy00: too funny! http://tinyurl.com/pqhugm,” I’ll probably have to wait until I get back to my desk to see the funny.