YouTube has rolled out the latest element in its recent redesign efforts, now focusing on the upper “fold” of its site.

The San Bruno based site has recently made an effort to enhance their public image, likely due in part to the Google transition. Their logo was enhanced to a more “web 2.0″ style, with gradients and reflections, and their interface went through a slight change.

One notable part of this redesign is that it’s now extremely image intensive, something most Web 2.0 sites have attempted to drift away from using a combination of XHTML and CSS. Surprisingly, most of YouTube’s “mission critical” elements, portions such as the tabs along the top, or something as simple as an “Upload Video” link are now images. From a web design standpoint, these parts could be effectively substituted with standard text (this would also decrease loading time/bandwidth, and no doubt they have problems witih that).

It’s a dramatic change as well in YouTube’s image, as they’ve largely dropped their red colouring (it’s only prevalent in their logo and flash player). It’s an enigmatic change that leaves us asking where are they going next — what are they preparing for?

Edited slightly to clarify a point, thanks to Sam in the comments for pointing out my mistake.

The BBC is reporting that Microsoft are going to open up their online book search tool, Live Search Books, tomorrow.

Intended to compete with the already started Google Book Search, Live Search Books will start with a library of books from the British Library, the University of California and the University of Toronto.

I think it’s really good that there’s good competition between Google and Microsoft in these web-based services. It keeps both Microsoft and Google on their toes and producing really good products.

For example, Google really pushed the envelope (pun intended) with Gmail, and it has forced Microsoft (and Yahoo as well, but I’ll come to them) to get to work on updating their email services.

Meanwhile, Yahoo seem to be struggling. I’m sure you’ve already read elsewhere about their recent corporate reorganisation, and while Yahoo are doing some good things, they’re not keeping up with the pace of innovation Google and Microsoft are setting in the web service arena. A large proportion of people are aware of Google Maps/Local or Windows Live Local (or both), but how many people would fire up Yahoo Maps? The new Yahoo Mail Beta does have Ajax and nice features, but to me it seems a lot more bloated than both Gmail and Windows Live Mail Beta.

I’m not saying Yahoo Maps or Mail are worse products - for the most part they’re actually on par with Google and Microsoft’s offerings, but Yahoo is increasingly being seen as a company from the ‘old web’ and rapidly losing their appeal to Google and Microsoft.

Yahoo will have to do some serious thinking if they want to get back in this game. They won’t die quickly - they still do a lot of content providing (like Yahoo News) and have a good share of the webmail market, for example. But alarm bells must be ringing at Yahoo HQ, because they need to innovate now if they’re to survive.

This isn’t the regular Gizbuzz podcast, but the PodDev web development podcast which is also part of Oratos. It normally lives over here , but I’m putting this episode into the Gizbuzz podcast feed because I think you’ll like it! We have Narendra Rocherolle, co-founder of 30boxes with us for the whole episode, and he has some great insight into the issues we talked about.

The fourth episode features:

• Jotspot has some support problems during the Google transition
• The Wii has a browser, and the web is in new places - what does this mean for webdev?
• Yahoo’s new content properties forgo RSS, can enterprise accept RSS as a standard?
• An interview with Narendra Rocherolle, co-founder of 30boxes.com

Download

Enjoy!

NerdNirvana have a post apparently showing the current number of sold units on all three of the supposed ‘next generation’ consoles - the Xbox 360, the PS3 and the Wii.

Rather unsurprisingly, the Xbox 360 wins at the moment, having been out for the longest time period, and the PS3 lags somewhat, presumably because of the delays in shipping and the low availability of the console.

Nintendo, apparently, seem to be doing a lot better and have shipped over 1,000,000 Wii consoles already. It’s only one seventh of Xbox 360 sales, but considering we’ve barely had a few weeks with the Wii, it’s looking very promising.

Nintendo’s strategy as far as battling the titans of Sony and Microsoft is to aim at the market with a different angle. The Wii is clearly not trying to be the absolute best graphics, and they’re focusing on innovating on the way we play video games (the Wiimote) and going for the pure ‘fun’ factor over seriously big-budget titles.

Whether this will propel Nintendo into a higher market and mind share than they had in the last round with the GameCube, we won’t know yet. And until Sony gain momentum with the PS3 shipping lots of units, we won’t know whether Microsoft will get another industry tightly in its grip or not.

[NerdNirvana via CrunchGear]

Zoho emailed today to say that they had launched three new features for Writer and Sheet. I had just finished a post I was pleased with about them, when IE6 crashed and the lack of an autosave in the host-your-own version of Wordpress meant that I lost it. Since I can’t be bothered to write the whole thing out again, here’s an [edited] extract from the Zoho blog post, with some analysis (the interesting bit!) below that.

Today, we announce three different additions to Zoho.

1. Zoho Plugin for Microsoft Office

We are very excited about the plugin for Microsoft Office as this extends the Office functionality online offering mobility etc….or should I say ‘This is what Office Live is supposed to be’ .

2. Zoho APIs

Zoho APIs is our first major step towards opening up our applications to be integrated into other services. With these well defined APIs, other web apps can now integrate closely with Zoho applications.

3. Desktopize for Zoho (Download)

Desktopize, our partner customized their offering for Zoho making our applications behave more like a desktop application. If you like desktop shortcuts, quick tray access, Drag-n-drop documents into Zoho apps, I recommend installing this application.

Two significant things which come out of this. One concerns the ‘ideology’ of Online Office (OO) and the other Zoho specifically. Firstly, the plugin for MS Office and the Desktopize for Zoho releases are a clear attempt to blur the line between desktop and web apps, in what I see as a very sensible move. At the moment when I start to write a document I have to take a decision; do I sacrifice all the advanced features and fantastic UI of Office 2007 for the better revision control and superb collaboration features available with OO, or do I spurn the revision control and collaboration for the UI and features? With the office plugin release, Zoho is hoping that people will chose to store all their documents with them, and then when they don’t need collaboration they can use their desktop suite, and when they do they can switch into online mode.

The Zoho-specific point is that I guess this is the end of Zoho Drive. When Peter and I interviewed Raju Vegesna in July, he talked of an imminent launch of Zoho Drive, which would be a central location in which to store all your documents, which you could then chose to either open locally or on the web. It looks like they are taking an individual product approach, which I think is a shame. The API means that they are obviously hoping that online storage providers will build that functionality for them.

[Definitely not via TechCrunch, but Arrington's new editor did get the scoop (I'm not bitter!)]

Update: Raju confirms in the comments that Drive will not now be released. I have mixed feelings on this. In some ways it helps them maintain the focus, and maybe Zoho/Adventnet isn’t the right company to do it. However, I liked the premise of it, and it is radically different from what the storage companies are interested in at the present. There is a massive niche there, and the first to market with an online storage solution built around an online office suite has the potential to make a lot of money. It’s a shame I can’t code!

I’ve decided there are a few products that I really should write about, that I don’t. Mozy, an online backup tool I use, is one of them. The reason I haven’t written about it before is frankly because I don’t think about it, because I don’t need to. It just works.

Everyone should backup, few people do. A proper backup strategy for a normal home user would consist of backing up absolutely everything to either a NAS or an external hard disk, and then backing up as much as possible to an offsite secure facility where your data will be held encrypted. In reality, the closest most people get to the above is a few CDs of data kept in a draw, burnt whenever someone remembers. That’s all I did, until I had a scare when I thought my laptop’s hard drive had died, and that I had lost all my work (in fact it had merely become unplugged). I now backup quite carefully.

Mozy is an important part of my new found responsible behavior. It sits on my desktop and my laptop, running in the background, doing a differential backup every few hours of the files and folders I have told it to, encrypting it first, sending it off to a data center. There is a free version, though that only gives you a 2GB storage quota.

Mozy’s success can be measured in the fact that I pay for the extra storage. I have a Dreamhost account with a total of 200GB of space, and as far as I can remember 1TB of bandwidth. I could backup to Dreamhost, but there is simply no easier way to do it than Mozy, so I pay the few dollars a month.

Sorry if that read like a press release! Although they do have an affiliate program I’m not part of it! I hope to do more features like that in the future; these sorts of products that work really well don’t tend to get much coverage, because, lets face it, who’s interested in backup tools until they lose their data!

As some had predicted, Apple is to try and emulate the US tradition of ‘Cyber Monday’, which is the first Monday after Thanksgiving, over here in the UK with special deals both online and in store, with rumoured DJs in every Apple Store.

The discounts over in the US for the event were quite good, and so hopefully we’ll see significant cuts off our prices, which are higher than those in the US anyway.

Have fun!