Google on for a makeover?

Recently, Google announced officially that they are no more getting any profits from Youtube, along with a few other ventures like Google Checkout, Print Ads etc. To stress on the severity of the situation, Google even went on to say that Youtube might well prove to be a significant risk for the search ads giant. That is understandable, considering the amount of bandwidth and storage Youtube eats up every hour. But, what would Google do now? Since the incubation about 10 years ago, Google has been on a upward run, acquiring anything interesting and adding the Google brand to it. This included the likes of Blogspot, Picasa, Feedburner and ofcourse Youtube, which was bought for a whopping 1.65$ Billion. But, has the Google's downslide started? Is history repeating, as it happened the software giant Microsoft a few years ago?
For instance, I agree there were trivial improvements to youtube in the past few months, but has there been any major innovation? What happened to the iGoogle? Though it was a big hit overnight, soon Yahoo! and Live where able to kick butt, at least to some extent. What about orkut? Facebook is now in news everyday, but we seldom hear about orkut. Has the buying spree of Google cost them dearly?
Two weeks back, Google acquired Omnisio, a video annotation company for reviving Youtube. But still, for the first time, Google seems desperate and upset over Youtube, as this statement from Google proves,"[The] anticipated benefit of may of our acquisitions may not materialize. For example, we have yet to realize significant revenue benefits from our acquisitions of dMarc Broadcasting (Audio Ads) and YouTube."
Google is the undisputed king of internet, at least as on date. But, how many days more? I believe they have already entered the red zone, and you might well get to see some real makeovers to keep them in game. Rather than taking over anything that comes their way, Google might try to make the existing businesses profitable.
Recently an ad by Google on newspaper read,
"We are very much like a startup company, and think in the same way. So if you are innovative..." it goes on. I think, Google has to pull up their socks, if they don't want to end up like a startup company.
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Digsby, the new IM cloud.

People might have heard about twitter, it is a place where people can maintain an online, public diary. People could write whatever they want directly from the twitter portal or even through various IMs by adding twitter ID as buddy and sending them IMs. The service is really unique (and wierd, some may think), but nevertheless very popular. It even won the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSWi)( aka "spring break for geeks.") awards. Twittering is also referred to as micro-blogging.
Now, after creating a new realm in the web, they are with their new product, Digsby ( I could not get a meaning for this word, though). Digsby is an integrated IM client which can handle multiple protocols like Yahoo!, MSN, Gmail, AOL etc. But, that doesnt end there, it can handle e-mails and more amazingly the social networking accounts like MySpace, Facebook too. That might give it an edge over the existing Trillian, Miranda etc. And the interface too looks better.
At first, even I thought Digsby is just another Trillian. But, it didn’t take me much to realize I am wrong. The installation was a breeze( you have binaries for Windows, Linux and Mac, I tried Windows). Then the configuration, you can add your accounts to it, IM accounts, e-mail accounts, and Social Networking accounts( only MySpace and Facebook for now, but they promise for more in future). Once this is done, the main window is divided into panes to show your chat buddies, mails and social links. You can even configure their placement. It looks really organized. Another feature is you can group your buddies, that is, if you have a same buddy in MSN, Gtalk and Yahoo!, you can create a single nickname for that and it would be compact. Whenever you run your mouse over a buddy name in the list, it will automatically show his profile details, fetched from the internet. Another good thing about Digsby is that it has dozens of nice and appealing themes for every taste. I spent over a night choosing my style. The information and alerts come up as nice little pop-ups on desktop. Digsby also lets you create your own widgets.
In the downside, there is not support for Orkut and other social networking accounts. And in the IM side, the buddy images does not come up correctly, even if they have an avatar of icon, set, Digsby tends to ignore it and show the default icon. But things will change in the near future. Atleast, the beta tag is still hanging around Digsby’s neck. So, hope you enjoy the experience with purple colored, egg shapped, capped buddy.
Digsby Home.
Twitter Home.

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