Hasta La Gadget!

The team at Amazon behind the Kindle Fire series of smart tablets have made some relatively major changes to the Kindle Fire HDX 8.9. Besides adding an “X” to the name, the body of this machine has been completely redesigned – no more internal midframe, for example, here you’ll find a magnesium cast unibody. The […]

YouTube recently teamed up with Google + to come up with a way for YouTube users to control the comments that are posted on their videos.  It was rolled out to a select few users today, and will be available for all users by the end of the year.  “We are moving from comments to conversations.” said YouTube product manager Nundu Janakiram,

What is going to change? Currently, you see the last person to comment on the video; with the change you will see the most relevant conversations or comments first. Those comments that are relevant are determined so by the owner of the video.  Owners of the video will have the option to “blacklist” certain words that they do not want to see and also will be able to flag people as spam or abusive.

The new system is powered by Google+ and will be linked to the social networking site.  Comments from people in your Google+ circles will automatically be considered more relevant and moved up higher in the comments list, as well as them being able to see what you are commenting on videos.  Of course, there will be several privacy settings available, you can make conversations public or keep it between just you and certain friends.

Basically here are the new rules:  Are you the creator/owner of the video? If so, you have control over what your viewers see in the comments list, which I would assume is a huge relief.  For those of you that want to comment on a video; ask yourself, is what I am about to say relevant to the video? If yes, then most likely your comment will be considered positively by the creator. If no, to put it nicely, find something better to do, your comment will never be seen.

Mashable

If you’d hoped to stay out of the Google+ party whilst remaining a commenting member of YouTube this season, you may be out of luck. The folks at YouTube have made clear this week that they’re not about to let their commenting system go stagnant – as a result, they’ll be integrating Google+ commenting and […]

Comments on the internet: often a haven for trolls and axe-grinders, but comment threads also give rise to some insightful and entertaining commentary. In an effort to encourage the latter and to provide users with an improved experience, YouTube’s rolling out a new commenting system that integrates deeply with Google+. What does that mean, exactly? Much like that other social network’s News Feed, comments in YouTube will be based on relevance, not how recently they were posted. So, comments from people you know, celebrities and video creators, plus positively rated comments will percolate to the top of comment threads according to Big G’s ranking algorithms. Additionally, replies will be nested beneath original comments to better enable conversations. Like Facebook, should you find the idea of automated comment curation unsettling, you can always switch back to the old way of having the most recent comments show up first.

The integration with Google+ also broadens your commenting boundaries; post a comment on YouTube, then share that video on on G+ and comments and replies made on either site will show up in both places. You can also control who gets to read comments you make by choosing which circles will see them, so you can even have private conversations. As for content owners, the system borrows features from many other commenting platforms. To deal with comments at scale, channel admins can build user whitelists and blacklisted words and phrases to make moderation easy. YouTube Product Manager Nundu Janakiram tells us that the comments system has been in the works for over a year, and that these features are only the beginning. His team plans to provide even better tools for users and content creators to let them filter out the noise and increase the quality of comments. Initially, folks will be able to test out the new comments in the discussion tab on any YouTube channel’s home page, after which it’ll roll out to individual videos in the coming months — and we’d be shocked if these G+ enabled comments don’t make their way into many other Google properties eventually, too.

Filed under: Internet, Google

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With the DROID Ultra and the DROID Maxx out in stores now aside the DROID Mini, there’s not much else Motorola can do in the smartphone space – save the Moto X, of course. But what about tablets? This week the folks at Droid Landing have all but confirmed their intent to release a Motorola […]