Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Googlicious

Google Google Google

Investors want them, other companies want to be them.

And MBA students want to work for them (free snacks and casual dress, duh)

One of the great things about El Goog is that they keep coming out with new stuff. I’ve been messing around with a couple of their new things recently. One is really really cool. The other’s just a little bit scary.

Scary stuff first.

I’ve been using Google Maps on my blackberry since I got it in August. It’s been pretty fantastic, even if it seemed buggy in a couple respects. But last weekend, I went to use it and was asked if I wanted to upgrade to the new version.

Sure I said, bring it on.

I downloaded the new version of the application, and booted it up to start messing with it. There was a new option on the menu.

“My Location”

I clicked on it, and immediately I got a dot on what was nearly my exact position at the center of a large circle.

It said that was my approximate location within a couple hundred meters.

That’s great if I get kidnapped and wonder where I am…but what if I plan on kidnapping someone else? Maybe the Google software can help find me (which would be a bad thing, because I’m sure if I kidnap someone, there will be a really good reason and I shouldn’t get caught by the police).

I'm sure this type of thing may be mentioned in their user terms of agreement. Of course, I did what everyone else does, completely ignore them because they’re a complete waste of time.

So the fact that they might be able to find me is a little scary. Fortunately, I’ve found their other new development cool enough to outweigh that scariness.

It’s a little addition to YouTube called ‘Insight.’

Let’s say you uploaded a video of you moonsaulting your cousin Ed onto a breakaway table as part of some amateur backyard wrestling.

In the past, you had no real information about how your video was playing, you only had a view count, which is a little simple for a data driven analysis of your backyard wrestling ways.

But now with Insight, you can get tons of INSIGHT (get it, the name is what it does) on your viewing audience.

Since I uploaded footage of my TV appearances to YouTube months ago, and since those have been viewed over 75,000 times, I had plenty of data to warm my little GSB heart. (note: this doesn’t count the ~500k viewers watching Kebert Xela clips, as they were uploaded by someone else)

And what a treasure trove of information!

I can look at all my YouTube views and see how viewers are finding my videos, I can see when my views spike across different places in the country, I can even see how many times I’ve been viewed in different countries across the globe (I’m unusually big in Poland)

But a more interesting analysis comes when I look at the demographics of my viewing public.

Below, a graph of my viewing audience by gender.


Females outweigh Males by 26 percentage points! Very interesting…especially for a medium (Internet Video) that we can assume is used more by men than women.

The lesson here, is that chicks dig me.

Of course I couldn’t stop there. Below, is a demographic chart of the age ranges of my viewers. The green and gray together represent totals, the gray represents male viewers, and the green, are my large female fan base.



Upon closer inspection, I appear to have strength in two large blocks.

Boys ages 0 – 18

And Women ages 35 – 55

The final lesson, it seems, is that it’s not chicks that dig me, it’s soccer moms.

I guess I’ll take that.

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