Google announced this morning that YouTube's new Insight video viewer analytics now includes free demographic stats on any video's viewers. YouTube users who have included gender in their user profiles can be anonymously reported and providing your age is a requirement to open an account with YouTube.

It's interesting to know that my latest video about late night escapades was viewed primarily by men ages 30 to 50. In a few minutes I will embed in this post a video of myself eating a live baby chicken and will report back on viewer demographics when they become available. You can view the demographics on your videos by clicking the "insight" button next to each video on your account view.

Geographic location is also reported as part of the Insight package. Statistics can be limited to any time frame and are viewable side by side with metrics on a video's relative popularity and leading sources of off-site inbound traffic. It's a great little metrics package.

Presumably YouTube isn't getting all Facebook Beacon on us and tracking the demographics of users logged into YouTube but viewing videos embedded around the web. That would be a positive thing to see in anonymous aggregate. Since such views are unlikely to be counted, perhaps I should spare the fluffy little baby chick. Oh what the heck, let's give it a try.

These kinds of statistics were presumably available for advertisers, in large quantities, since the dawn of YouTube. Breaking them out on a video by video basis and offering a nice interface is a very logical next step but one that too few services online would take the time to provide - much less for free.

It would be nice if users were given the option to publicly expose their video Insight statistics and could view them on a chanel-wide basis instead of just for a single video. Update! I was wrong, several readers pointed out that YouTube does offer aggregate demographics of all your videos! Thanks, friends!

Communications giant Comcast has acquired social web application Plaxo for an estimated $150m or more. Techcrunch confirmed the deal first but offers an understated critique of the alliance. Many web users familiar with the operations of both companies are much more upset about the deal.

Plaxo has probably the most clouded reputation of any of the major participants in the current data portability discussion, except perhaps for Microsoft. Comcast is no angel either. Together the two companies will be ill prepared to serve end users well.

Users Want ISPs Out of the Way

The plan for Plaxo at Comcast appears to be for the acquired company to power media publishing, sharing, lifestream aggregation and presumably contact management. The problem is that there's a whole market of alternatives for those services and many users just want their ISPs to deliver the damn internet so they can use it however they see fit.

Comcast has done a poor job of this lately. By engaging in a practice called "traffic shaping," whereby the company throttles down the bandwidth available for activities like media downloading, Comcast has made itself the poster child proving that network neutrality is a valid concern. How much further would things need to go before Comcast slows the user experience to a crawl when users seek to visit sites that compete with Comcast properties? The kind of lifestream aggregation that Plaxo offers is an emerging bandwidth hog - perhaps Comcast customers ought not be allowed to use lifestreaming apps other than Plaxo.

Likewise, you'd expect your address book to mind its own business - but that's not what Plaxo has been about traditionally. Email inboxes around the world used to be filled up with spammy requests for contact info from Plaxo. ("hi, this is Joe, could you update the contact info I have for you in Plaxo?") While the company's earliest reputation as one of the biggest scum-bags of the mainstream social web has been greatly softened lately by a very charming (and now wealthy) young exec named Joseph Smarr, the old tarnish is hardly gone from many peoples' minds. Some users complain that Plaxo is still spammy and some people in data portability circles, where nouveau hip geeks like Plaxo (and yours truly) hang out, say that Plaxo is still clearly doing what's best for Plaxo above all else.

Maybe big money on the table means never having to do more than say you're sorry, but the Plaxo deal with Comcast is liable to hit more bumps in the road than just an unpopular history.

Mismatched Visions, If Everyone's Telling the Truth

One-stop social web shopping at your ISP isn't an unusual vision at all. Plaxo's data portability talk seems at risk of going out the window for the relatively cheap price of $150m, though. Comcast is far more likely to want Plaxo to power a new line of Comcast branded social web services than they are to want their customers running links off-site to Yahoo and Google properties through their Comcast experience.

Given the histories of both companies, something devious is liable to happen. Perhaps though Comcast just wanted to acquire some human resources, including people who figured out how to spam the whole web for contact information and just a few short years later end up hated less than a telco. That is impressive, even if not enough to warrant trust from users.

One of the buzz phrases we've heard a lot this year is "data portability", which means the ability to move your personal data between different applications and vendors. It has its own standards group, called naturally enough DataPortability.org. Some of the big Internet companies have signaled their support for data portability - in January Google and Facebook joined DataPortability.org, and in February Microsoft announced a strategy shift towards Data Portability for its core products Windows and Office.

ReadWriteTalk host Sean Ammirati this week interviewed Chris Saad, the co-founder of DataPortability.org, to ask him how the group has been progressing - and perhaps more importantly where it's headed next.

What's Next at DataPortability.org

As Sean explained in his intro, since being founded about 6 months ago one of Data Portability's primary goals has been to 'develop a narrative' for data portability. That has largely been successful and the topic was actively discussed at SxSW and Web 2.0 Expo this year. Sean asked Chris what is next on the list of things for DataPortability.org to do? He responded that technical best practices are next up:

"...if we don't deliver a fairly solid set of best practices, particularly technical best practices - preferably the early versions of the policy and user experience best practices as well - I would be slightly disappointed. It's a massive group with a really important and broad problem domain. So I'm extremely proud of the group so far. But I think we're well on our way to delivering a good and comprehensive first draft of our technical best practices."

As an example, Chris pointed to "a document or a set of documents that explains how one would implement, let's say, logging in, discovering what services a user uses, how you would authenticate against those services, how you would expect to get certain of those data back, and perhaps how you would go about updating that data."

Getting Facebook On Board

It's fair to say that some of the big vendors still haven't totally embraced Data Portability, despite the public displays of support from the likes of Google, Microsoft and Facebook. In particular, Chris Saad noted that "Facebook is the least communicative" of the big Internet companies when it comes to liaising with DataPortability.org. However he has been very happy with progress made by Microsoft, Google, and MySpace.

In the podcast, Sean referenced a RWW interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in which Zuckerberg told Marshall Kirkpatrick: "We are philosophically aligned with the Data Portability movement, but we're pushing it our own way to make the world a more opened place." Zuckerberg's point being that Facebook is focusing on questions of privacy and user control, as perhaps more important pieces of the data portability puzzle.

Chris Saad's response to that was: "I don't believe that it's a zero-sum game where privacy needs to give way to Data Portability or vice versa." He went on to explain:

"...I think with a level of common sense and with the checks and balances that we're building into the architecture, that privacy will be not an off-shoot, but it will be dealt with and dealt with in the only way that it can. I'm making it analogous it to Wi-Fi. Just because you can't connect to a Wi-fi. hotspot doesn't mean that you choose to. And when you connect, it doesn't mean that it's a free flow. It means you may need to put in your password and username to grant permission and various things. And that's very much analogous to what we're doing."

So according to Chris, "privacy is not being ignored" in the Data Portability movement. Certainly the technical best practices the group is working on will help companies like Facebook adapt to the emerging world of data portability. The question is: will Facebook pay attention to them? It will also be interesting to see how much 'walking the talk' Microsoft and Google do.