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Source:Mashable!

How many times have you seen a YouTube video and just had to buy a product or a service related to the video? Ok, never. But still, if you want to spend your hard earned cash in these times of looming recession, now you can do it directly from YouTube.

Thousands of YouTube partner videos will now get click-to-buy links, which appear on the watch page beneath the video, right there with the other community features, like share, favorite, or flag. For starters, iTunes and Amazon.com links will be embedded on videos from media companies such as EMI Music - I cannot see it, because it apparently works only in the United States. Google says that they’ll slowly expand this program to international users, too.

Google promises that this is just the beginning of a broad e-commerce platform from which both users and partners will benefit. Partners who use YouTube’s content identification and management system can enable these links on user-generated content, if they use Content ID to claim videos and choose to leave them up on the site. So, next time you create that viral video, kids, make sure that it features a lots of enticing products which your viewers might want to buy.

From the user perspective, maybe sometime in the future this turns out to be the key of making YouTube profitable, but currently it’s just a bunch of simple “buy me” links which are far from earth shattering.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:YouTube Puts AdSense in Embedded PlayersYouTube Adds “Choose Another Image” for Video ThumbnailsYouTube on YouTube’s UpdatesYouTube Clips Further Integrated into Google NewsGoogle Maps Hangs Up on Click-to-CallNew Video Tagging Services: Veotag and Click.TVShoZu Adds Facebook App and One-Click Upload

Source:Mashable!

Facebook rolled out Microsoft Live Search today as an integrated part of its search. It gives the exact same results as you would get on Live.com, but in generic Facebook layout.

Sorry Facebook, that’s not really all that exciting. Especially for the innovators of the Internet, we know you can do better. So in that spirit, here are a few quick suggestions for Facebook to make its newly upgraded search features more interesting and a hell of a lot more useful:

1) Show your friends’ searches in News Feed

Come on, who doesn’t want to know who their girlfriend or boyfriend has been searching for? There would be hours of entertainment just watching your news feed fill up with searches. Find out who has been searching for you or announce to the world that you’ve been searching that one girl you work with ten times a day.

Maybe on second thought…

2) Live search cashback for Facebookers

What college kid doesn’t need a little more cash on the side for…uh, books? For those who don’t already know, Microsoft offers a cashback program for searching and shopping through Live.com. It only amounts to a few bucks here and there, but to a cash-strapped college student? That’s a case of Bud Light, baby!

So come on Facebook, help out the poor college student. Give them a financial reason to justify their 4-hour-a-day Facebook usage.

3) Add Live Image and Video search

Facebook Live search functionality is very basic. Search for a term, come up with some website results. But often times we are not just searching for Web sites, but images, videos, and other dynamic media. Live search, just like the other major search engines, has the functionality to search for images, videos, news, and more. Why not extend this to Facebook? Facebook, as one of the largest photo libraries in the world, is a natural place for image searching. I’m hoping that Facebook will eventually offer it as well, because when someone updates their status about their new car, I’d like to quickly search for a picture of it.

4) Some space-themed search backgrounds, anyone?

I’m sorry, but I’m simply a fan of space, space exploration, the stars, you name it. I’m attracted to the very cool layout that Live.com uses as its homepage theme. Hover around the page and you’ll find information on NASA projects and more.

Now, I’m not saying Facebook needs to go all out, but some Moon action would be great to look at while I search. It will give Facebook Search some… unique flavor.

5) Suggest searches based on my friends and related searches

Facebook’s core asset and one of its best value propositions is its social graph. Knowing what your friends are doing and who they are connected to are invaluable pieces of information. Using this information to help suggest searches, just as Live.com does with related searches, would help people discover new and relevant content based on their social circles. Plus you can insert suggested searches into the news feed.

Funny. That sort of sounds like Facebook Beacon…

6) Allow users to comment and vote on search results

I couldn’t finish this list off without tipping my hat to one of our commenters. Oliver suggests that Facebook should allow users to comment and vote on search results. It’s an interesting suggestion that I actually envision happening in the future.

The reason this is possible is because Facebook already allows you to do this for your news feed and for ads you see. You can vote ads down and you can comment on any news feed item. It’s a little more complicated of a proposition to do it for search, but it is done by sites such as scour.com. The extra benefit to Microsoft is that it will have a mountain of user-generated data on their preferences in search. This can only help to improve their results.

Regardless of whether or not Facebook takes my suggestions and uses them, you can expect a lot more features to come out of Facebook’s new integration with Live search. And you can expect people using Facebook even more than they already do.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Facebook Claims to Lead in People SearchFacebook Launches Auto-Complete Feature for Quick Access to FriendsSujjest Offers Visual eBay SearchFacebook Overtakes MySpace for Search Inquiries in the UKTalkShoe Upgrades to the Facebook PlatformFacebook Rolls Out Microsoft Live SearchGoogle Launches Official Facebook App

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 7th, 2008 at 7:31 pm and is filed under social networking, search, facebook, web 2.0, microsoft, web, live, Opinion, microsoft live search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.