Volume 17, Issue 39 Atari Online News, Etc. October 16, 2015 Published and Copyright (c) 1999 - 2015 All Rights Reserved Atari Online News, Etc. A-ONE Online Magazine Dana P. Jacobson, Publisher/Managing Editor Joseph Mirando, Managing Editor Rob Mahlert, Associate Editor Atari Online News, Etc. Staff Dana P. Jacobson -- Editor Joe Mirando -- "People Are Talking" Michael Burkley -- "Unabashed Atariophile" Albert Dayes -- "CC: Classic Chips" Rob Mahlert -- Web site Thomas J. Andrews -- "Keeper of the Flame" With Contributions by: Fred Horvat To subscribe to A-ONE, change e-mail addresses, or unsubscribe, log on to our website at: www.atarinews.org and click on "Subscriptions". OR subscribe to A-ONE by sending a message to: dpj@atarinews.org and your address will be added to the distribution list. To unsubscribe from A-ONE, send the following: Unsubscribe A-ONE Please make sure that you include the same address that you used to subscribe from. To download A-ONE, set your browser bookmarks to one of the following sites: http://people.delphiforums.com/dpj/a-one.htm Now available: http://www.atarinews.org Visit the Atari Advantage Forum on Delphi! http://forums.delphiforums.com/atari/ =~=~=~= A-ONE #1739 10/16/15 ~ Chrome's Web Security! ~ People Are Talking! ~ Firebee News Update! ~ Star Wars Battlefront! ~ League of Legends! ~ Blizzard's Overwatch! ~ ~ 'PC Does What' Campaign ~ -* Yahoo Mail & Third Party Mail *- -* Yahoo Aims To Phase Out Passwords! *- -* Facebook's Goal: To Be More Like Youtube! *- =~=~=~= ->From the Editor's Keyboard "Saying it like it is!" """""""""""""""""""""""""" Well, this has been a "short" week due to the Columbus Day holiday. As usually happens, the news has been in short demand this past week; I guess more people are concerned with the Kardashians rather than focus on new technology and the issues that arise because of them! The weather has been changing, as has been evident by the ever-changing colors of the leaves. The foliage is starting to really show here in southern New England - perhaps another week before it gets to "peak" colors. As I said above, it's been a short week. This issue reflects the limited news, and size this week. Hopefully everything will pick up again soon! Until next time... =~=~=~= FireBee News by Fred Horvat In a prior submission I mentioned that I wanted to try and setup the FireBee to be a main use or day to day machine. What I will be testing will obviously only applies to my personal workflow. Everybody has different uses and needs out of their computer. The first set of applications I will be testing will be Web Browsing on the FireBee. Currently the Web Browser may be the most used/important program on any computer. My thought process on testing the browsers on the FireBee was to hit many of the sites that I visit on a daily basis like I would any other PC I use. I did try running CAB 2.7 on the FireBee but it did not run at all for me. I have heard that other users were able to load CAB but there is no OVL file specific to the FireBee/MiNT so CAB cannot access the network which means you cannot access the Internet. Not a huge loss since CAB was from the late 90’s but I still like having an additional browser handy for special occasions. Netsurf 2.9 http://www.netsurf-browser.org/ comes with the FireBee MiNT installation. I tried the latest test build version 3.4 of Netsurf found here : http://ci.netsurf-browser.org/builds/atari/ that I am using under Aranym but on the FireBee it is fails to run stating that this build requires a FPU. So the 2.9 build that comes with MiNT on the FireBee is a special Coldfire build. The only other Web Browser I found for the FireBee was Highwire. http://highwire.atari-users.net/ As with Netsurf there is a special Coldfire build available here https://freeshell.de/~monokrom/geeklog/downloads/index.php?id=file_HighWire_0.34b5_v4e Of the two browsers I was initially using Highwire the most as I was using that under AFROS and Aranym for the past year. I also had all my most used sites bookmarked for Highwire under Aranym. I transferred over the bookmark.htm file to the FireBee and was running quickly. But as I got more time with Netsurf I started using it more often than Highwire. Netsurf simply rendered sites better and had more functionality over Highwire though Highwire seemed faster on simple sites. A big negative with Highwire is that it does not handle SSL or Secure Sites (like sites that start with HTTPS). So just about any site that would request a User ID and Password Highwire cannot access. Netsurf can handle SSL so I did try some sites that required it for logging in. I went to Gmail and I was able to log in and it stated that JavaScript is required for Gmail Standard View. If you wanted a Mobile Version or the Standard HTML non JavaScript version of Gmail click on your choice. I chose the Standard View. In standard view Gmail worked fine. A couple of other web sites complained about the lack of JavaScript and or Cookies. Sometimes the sites would let you continue warning you about the possible loss of functionality while other sites would not let you in at all. I did try logging into a financial site I believe it was Paypal and the JavaScript and Cookie warning came up. So I ended up not continuing any further. One test I did do was load and run Netsurf on other computers and Operating Systems to see if any issues were specific to the Atari build or not. Under Ubuntu Linux the current Netsurf build from the Ubuntu application repository was also Version 2.9. With Ubuntu Netsurf behaved almost identically to the Atari build. Under Linux I could not access any more sites than I could than on the FireBee. So whatever strange behavior I had on the FireBee I also experienced that with Linux. With FreeBSD the Netsurf Version was 3.0. I did get a little different rendering and behavior but not much. There is no official build of Netsurf for Windows but there are Test Builds currently Version 3.4. These builds were really strange acting. One nightly build could run sites the day before could not and some builds seem to have SSL and some didn’t. I tried official and Test Builds of Netsurf for OS X from version 2.9 to 3.4 and none of them ran very well and would crash at random times. Lastly as mentioned before I run both official and Test Builds of Netsurf under Aranym and generally for the Atari platform they work well. Biggest take away from testing on non Atari platforms is that the official build is more stable than the nightly test builds. It is nice though that Netsurf is very portable than can run on many platforms. Now I mostly use Netsurf on the FireBee. Because it can access more sites and generally renders sites much better than Highwire. Here are some things I ran into that affected my web experience with the FireBee. I cannot access my primary E-mail Account with Netzero. The page just displays a white screen. This behavior was the same regardless of what version or platform I ran Netsurf on. I could add this E-mail account to Gmail and have Gmail Send and Receive mail from that account. I did this many years ago combining a couple of different accounts in a Webmail account but I just didn’t care for it. I will attempt shortly to setup an Email Client on the FireBee to access this account. Dropbox on the FireBee the Log In button was displayed over another button and neither one worked. With the same version of Netsurf on Linux the same thing happened. If I used a newer build of Netsurf on any platform the buttons worked but I could not log on completely to see my data. I would get the User ID and Password screen and would fill it out and click Login but that’s as far as I got. Some interesting things I discovered while using Netsurf on the FireBee. Generally memory usage was 20-40MB of RAM to view most sites. Some sites though memory usage was over 130MB just to load the first page of the site. One that I remember was http://weather.com/ To my eye there was nothing special to the web page but the further I went on the site the memory usage climbed. Good thing the FireBee has 512MB of RAM! This also leads into the time to render sites. Normally after hitting Enter after typing in a URL a few seconds later the web site would appear on the screen. Some sites would take well over a minute sometimes even 2 minutes. The mentioned http://weather.com/ was one site as was http://yahoo.com/ and http://atari.com/ At first I thought the FireBee had locked up but the action icon in the upper right on Netsurf showed that it was still processing so I waited and waited and finally the page displayed. Somewhere I read that the Coldfire processor in the FireBee is similar to a 120mhz 68060 chip if one existed. (I cannot find where I read that so I can’t link to it here.) So overall the speed of Netsurf on the FireBee is not bad at all. A feature of Netsurf on all platforms is the F3 option allowing you to save Web Pages to your local machine. I did this when I went to the ACEC Swap Meet at the end of August. I knew I would not have Internet capability while at the show. I went to a few Atari related sites before the show and saved them to the SD Card and read them in both Highwire and Netsurf at the show to show people the speed and rendering capability of the browsers and machine. Something I noticed with Highwire is some sites think you are on a mobile device and the sites will serve up their Mobile Versions to you. http://osnews.com/ and http://accuweather.com/ are two that come to mind. This is both good and bad. Good that the sites are lighter and process less data for increased speed. Bad thing is that you don’t get the same content or style that you are used to with the non-mobile page. Final thoughts with surfing the Web on the FireBee. There is no Java or Adobe Flash available on the FireBee (nor any Atari Platform as far as I am aware). This is not a bad thing to me. Some can say that these are vectors for security exploits to your system but for me they are added bloat and slow your experience at times considerably. On my personal machines I do not have either installed and run Chromium Browser as my main browser which has no plugins installed. If I need functionality as Java or Flash I load Google Chrome which has these and many other plugins included. On the FireBee I could not access all the sites I normally do with my Windows or Mac machine. I did not try that many financial sites. Security was not my main concern as I understand it the SSL is initiated on the Server Side (Web Site) and if you have the type and level of SSL that the site requires in your browser then the site will allow you to attempt to log in. But in my experience on the couple of sites I did try the lack of JavaScript as stated here: http://www.netsurf-browser.org/webmasters/ affected my ability to log into the sites. As I stated in the very beginning everybody’s usage is different. Generally outside of required JavaScript or an occasional website that Netsurf had an issue with my surfing experience was very good. Sites rendered well and speed was acceptable to me. =~=~=~= ->In This Week's Gaming Section - Blizzard's 'Overwatch' Entering Public Beta """"""""""""""""""""""""""""" Star Wars Battlefront: A First Look! =~=~=~= ->A-ONE's Game Console Industry News - The Latest Gaming News! """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" Blizzard's 'Overwatch' Shooter Entering Public Beta Blizzard is almost ready to put its colorful team-based shooter Overwatch in the hands of the public. An "extremely limited" number of US players will gain access to the closed beta on October 27th, followed by fans in Europe and Asia at a later date. Blizzard says it wants this group of testers to scrutinise every part of the gameplay, including the various heroes, maps and abilities. There's much to dissect, but in particular we suspect Blizzard will be looking at the individual characters and whether they're all balanced. If you fail to get into this elite group, fear not. Blizzard will also be running "Beta Test Weekends" from time to time, with the sole purpose of stress-testing its servers. The company will be limiting the modes, maps and heroes available, but it should still give you a flavour of the game and indicate if it's your cup of tea. Team-based shooters are nothing new, but Blizzard's pedigree means it's hard not to be just a little curious about the game. Its first cinematic trailer looked like something out of a Pixar movie, and if it can offer deep, over-the-top shooter mechanics, it could be a welcome break from the ever-proliferating MOBA genre. Star Wars Battlefront: A First Look The Beta for Star Wars Battlefront has ended, and it was great. First off, the game is simply beautiful to look at. From the icy mountains of Hoth, to the dry deserts of Tatooine, to the perfectly curated soundtrack, everything in Battlefront has been rendered with the utmost care and attention to detail. Developer DICE went so far as to even create menus and load screens that feel more “modern art gallery” than “ancient space action video game.” After gawking over the menus I decided to cut my teeth on the 16-player competitive deathmatch and wave-based survival modes first. Of the two, the deathmatch gave more of what you’d come to expect from a typical shooter. The survival mode was just the opposite, feeling more like it was initially designed as a tutorial but was later repurposed for use in the beta. Completing the six available waves required little to no skill or coordination with a teammate, and enemies often seemed as if they were fighting with blindfolds on. New players begin their fight with a simple blaster rifle and level up to upgrade to more advanced weaponry like sniper rifles and jetpacks. Scattered throughout the different maps are various power-ups that allow players to use special gear and vehicles. The most coveted of these will see players become Luke Skywalker, or even Darth Vader himself. But unlike most modern shooters, the beta lacked any real option to customize your gameplay. That means no class distinctions, no weapon customization, and no true custom load-outs. For players looking for an experience in the vein of Call of Duty, this might not be the game for you. Instead, Battlefront imposes a level playing field and in doing so, focuses almost entirely on players’ individual skill level. So here’s the bottom line, if you’re a fan of the original Star Wars trilogy and you don’t mind playing a stripped down shooter, then you’re probably going to love Star Wars Battlefront. And while it was a beta, it seems like the team at Dice has mastered the look and feel of the Star Wars universe. Personally, I can’t wait to see what the full game has in store on November 17th. League Of Legends’ Trolliest Game Mode Returns, Teemo Immediately Gets Banned Riot just reintroduced one of its whackiest creations back into League of Legends, the company’s inexplicably popular team-based multiplayer game where angry little gerbil things do battle against gigantic, vicious dragons. Only this time it’s missing everyone’s favorite bloodthirsty fuzz monster Teemo. “One For All” is a special alternate game mode that Riot first put into League of Legends in 2013. Like all of League’s best intentionally ridiculous “for fun” game modes, Riot’s only made it available for a few weeks at a time—a somewhat silly decision the developer’s made to preserve League’s singular appearance as a high-pressure competitive game. The conceit of One For All is that each five-person team chooses a single champion to play as for a match. League’s predominately played with five unique champions on each team playing against each other with meticulously crafted and thought-out plays and counterplays, so One For All, much like the game’s annual April Fool’s Day treat “Ultra Rapid Fire” mode URF), is totally fucking bonkers compared to normal games. That’s the whole point. This year, things are even sillier thanks to Riot enabling mirror matches, meaning that all ten players can take the same champion. One For All matches make for some hilarious moments, like when five different versions of the old bearded wizard dude Zilean are all chucking their clock-bombs at a wave of incoming Dariuses (via Reddit): Darius is an overpowered monster of a melee champ in League of Legends since his major reworking earlier this year, so I’d say he deserves every single one of those face-fulls of bombs. It’s also a hoot when you have a one team of Azirs using the sand warrior’s spirit-soldier summoning powers to play ping pong with the other team of Azirs: ...or when ten different Teemos fill an entire map with the master-troll champion’s infamous poison mushroom bombs: Errrrrr. Wait. That last one doesn’t apply to this year’s One For All mode, actually. Just a few hours after OFA went live yesterday, Riot put out another update for League that disabled the notorious and disgustingly cute champion from the mode. Riot also disabled Karthus, a Grim Reaper-esque champion who has a powerful spell move that sends a ghostly pillar of death energy down on all five enemy champions like so: In a post on the League of Legends forums, Riot said that Teemo and Karthus were both disabled lest their “core fantasies” end up trolling the enemy team a bit too hard: Heya guys, quick PSA. Teemo and Karthus have historically been disabled in the One For All game mode (their core fantasies create a degenerate play pattern for the opposing team, that goes above and beyond what the other champions can accomplish), but this morning they were accidentally still enabled for a few hours. We’ve since disabled them in the One For All queue. You can still use Teemo & Karthus in custom games if you want to though, on the map of your choice! :D As Riot said, they both have been disabled historically. But they’ve also been playable in OFA at other points in the game mode’s history as well. It seems silly to ban two champions for their troll potential when you’re making an optional game mode that’s literally based on the conceit of trolling your opponents and your teammates with ridiculous 10 v. 10 clone mirror match games. But at least there are 120 other champions you can do so with. One for all is available in League of Legends until October 26 at 2:00 AM PDT. You can find by logging into the League game client and selecting either player-vs.-player or player-vs.-bots games. =~=~=~= A-ONE's Headline News The Latest in Computer Technology News Compiled by: Dana P. Jacobson Microsoft Teams Up With PC Makers To Launch 'PC Does What?' Campaign Microsoft is partnering with Intel, HP, Dell, and Lenovo in a big marketing push to get consumers to buy new PCs with Windows 10. All five companies are contributing to a new campaign called “PC Does What?,” that’s designed to target consumers who have four- or five year-old computers. Intel claims there are around 500 million old machines out there, and naturally all of the companies involved want consumers to upgrade. The marketing campaign will launch initially on October 19th in the US and China, which is around 50 percent of the entire PC market. Normally these types of joint marketing campaigns don’t involve competitors products in the same spot, but that’s exactly what Dell, HP, and Lenovo are doing on some of the 30-second commercials. All of the spots involve someone shouting “PC Does What?” after seeing an edge-to-edge display, 360 degree rotations, or “amazingly thin designs.” Microsoft has launched several campaigns over the years to try and boost PC sales, including “laptop hunters” searching for a new PC for Windows Vista, and “I’m a PC” for Windows 7. This new “PC Does What?” campaign feels a lot like those, targeting consumers directly to convince them to refresh their hardware. With PC sales constantly in decline, it feels like the top OEMs are finally joining forces instead of running their own separate campaigns. These PC makers don’t want their sales going down without a fight, so get used to seeing these ads in newspapers, on TV, and online because this is a big push to get people to buy new computers. Chrome Shows Sites With Minor Security Issues as Totally Insecure Google has just launched Chrome 46, and there's a significant change in how it notifies you about web security. If you're on an HTTPS site that's 100 percent secure, you'll still see a green lock icon, and broken sites show a red "X" symbol, as before. However, when you hit a protected site with minor issues, you'll see absolutely no symbol, as if you were on a regular, unencrypted HTTP site (below). That's a big change from Chrome 45, when Google showed a lock symbol with a yellow triangle on such "mixed" sites. Google said it made the change to give Chrome users "fewer security states to learn. We've come to understand that our yellow 'caution triangle' badge can be confusing compared to the HTTP page icon." In other words, users might feel that a protected HTTPS site with minor errors is less secure than an HTTP site with no security, which is obviously not the case. More importantly, Google said that "this change is a better visual indication of the security state of the page relative to HTTP." The search giant's theory is that the lack of any warning won't discourage folks from browsing sites that are in the middle of migrating to HTTPS encryption. That in turn will encourage sites, it hopes, to make the switch, knowing they won't turn users off during the transition. In a separate post, Google said that number of HTTPS sites significantly increased, with 63 percent now secure compared to 58 percent last year. It plans to eventually reduce the number of states to two, either "secure," or "not secure." It likely won't do that until the internet reaches a certain threshold of HTTPS sites, however. In other words, if you're the webmaster of an insecure HTTP site, you may want to get ahead of that before you get a big, red "X." Yahoo Mail Will Now Let You Access Multiple Third Party Mailboxes In honor of Yahoo Mail’s 18th birthday, the company is announcing a major update to the mail client. In addition to a new interface, the app is designed to be more intuitive than previous versions. The update includes new design elements as well as new contact forms with more nuanced information, a more secure inbox, search filters, an undo-button, the death of passwords, and the ability to access multiple email clients through the Yahoo Mail app. The updates are rolling out across desktop and mobile starting yesterday. Perhaps the biggest update is that Yahoo Mail will now let you access email from other account providers through the Yahoo Mail app. Users will now be able to connect mail accounts from Outlook.com, Hotmail and AOL to Yahoo Mail. But not Gmail, which may be a bummer for a lot of people. Think of this feature as an answer to Apple’s iOS mail client. With Multiple Mailboxes, users will be able to search across all email boxes at once. Yahoo vice president of product Dylan Casey says that passwords and even security questions are an antiquated solution for protecting Web users. “We built a system that’s entirely complex, outdated, and doesn’t actually protect the user,” says Casey off the Webs dominate security protocol. To rectify that broken authentication system, Yahoo is killing off passwords in its latest release. Through a new feature called Account Key, users can choose to prove their identity by way of a push notification sent to their phone. The notification ask users if they’re trying to log into their account. Pressing ‘yes’ allows access to the account, pressing ‘non’ denies it. This new feature builds on a product the company release earlier this year called on-demand passwords, a two-factor authentication like experience where Yahoo emails a new password to your phone. Earlier this year Yahoo announced that it would hook into Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin to help to help flesh out Mail contacts and make them more relevant. This has led to the use of avatars to identify senders. The avatars are also a security provision. Yahoo Mail only delivers mail from “authorized senders” or those that stand up to the Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance authentication policy. That means less spam and less malware in your inbox. Hooking into social sites means more contextual data about your contacts. Yahoo Mail says with this data it can determine whether the person contacting you is a “top contact” and inputs the senders other contact details into a main contact card. The contact card also contains information about your email history with that person as well as stats, like how many emails you’ve exchanged. It also makes recommendations for other people who may be related to your contact like friends or colleagues. Yahoo senior director of product Fernando Delgado says this feature is especially helpful if you can’t remember where you met someone. Yahoo Mail’s heavy use of data also helps it to make recommendations on who you should add to an email chain. Yahoo Mail now has an undo button for returning emails you accidentally deleted. After you delete an email a button will appear at the bottom of the screen asking if you want to undo your last action. Though a simple addition, it’s a much nicer experience to bring deleted emails back to your inbox with the touch of button rather than having to pull them from your trash box. You can undo other actions to, like if you accidentally move an email to another folder or mark it unread. Yahoo Mail now has added filters for sifting through emails. The app lets you filter emails based on whether you’re looking for something you sent or received and also lets you search for images and documents. You can also search within a contact card for all the images or documents that a given person has sent you. The real power of this tool is finding older content, like photos from that trip to Paris you took three years ago. Yahoo Mail also keeps a record of your query history, so if you’ve searched for something before, it will auto-populate the search field as you type it. Yahoo made some slight tweaks to the app to optimize it for each operating system. For instance on Android the Yahoo Mail app uses Google’s Material Design. The Android version lays out emails in a “conversation” format, so multiple email exchanges appear cleaner. On iOS, when you search from the phone’s search bar for a contact, it will surface relevant Yahoo Mail emails. The company also said there are some special shortcuts for iOS 9, but didn’t go into details. For the most part the apps offer a mostly similar experience. On both iOS and Android, a swipe left on both interfaces with return you to the screen you were on before, for example. Overall This is a pretty big update for Yahoo, one that directly challenges Google’s Mail client. Yahoo is trying to make its email client increasingly relevant to users by incorporating news feeds and social data, hopefully drawing them away from Google. Last year the company rolled out travel and event notifications, in which Yahoo Mail pulls relevant details from your email to let you know you’re supposed to be somewhere. All this to say, it’s clear Yahoo is trying to find more ways to keep its customers within its own ecosystem. Yahoo Aims To Phase Out Passwords With New Service Yahoo's next step in password security is to eliminate them altogether. Starting on Thursday, the company announced, users of the Yahoo Mail app on both iOS and Android will have access to a new service called Yahoo Account Key, which uses smartphones to verify identities in lieu of traditional passwords. Here's how it works: When users who sign up for Account Key try to access Yahoo Mail, they will no longer need to enter their password. Instead, the Account Key service will send a message to the smartphone connected to the account. With a tap on yes or no, users can indicate it is a legitimate attempt to get into the account or deny unauthorized access. If their smartphone is lost or stolen, users can verify identities through an email or a text message sent to alternative accounts and numbers. In a blog post on Yahoo's Tumblr page, Dylan Casey, vice president of product management, said Account Key is more secure than traditional passwords because it prohibits anyone from signing in to access an account without the verification that Account Key provides. Satnam Narang, a security manager with Symantec, called the approach "a step above a password" but said it still falls short of the golden standard of what's known as two-factor authentication, which requires users to confirm their identify with two different pieces of information. He also expressed doubts that most users will let passwords die easily and encouraged widespread adoption of password management tools until a new verification method replaces them for good. "I think passwords are going to be around for a little while, I don't think they're going away as soon as we'd like them to. They're so ingrained in everything we do from banking to email to shopping, you name it," Narang said. In addition to Account Key verification, Yahoo executives announced a revamped version of Yahoo Mail that allows users to connect with, manage and search Outlook, Hotmail and AOL email accounts while signed in to their Yahoo account. The new Mail also connects to Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to add photos and create "contact cards" with email, telephone and social media information for contacts. Facebook Will Stop at Nothing To Be More Like YouTube It’s been a big week for video on Facebook. The social networking giant announced it will test a “dedicated place” on Facebook where users can go “when they exclusively want to watch video — whether that’s videos they’ve saved for later, or videos from friends, Pages they follow, and other video publishers on Facebook.” Those videos will be “relevant” to users, to use one of Facebook’s favorite terms. The new section, the company says, will let us watch, discover, and share videos that Facebook thinks we’d like — and “Like.” All of which sounds awfully similar to another “dedicated place” to watch videos online: YouTube. In the past year, Facebook has been rapidly encroaching on YouTube’s turf as the place to catch a BuzzFeed clip or Star Wars preview. In April, Facebook said it surpassed four billion daily video views as it continues encouraging users to embed videos natively on its site. Last month, Facebook’s ad product lead Ted Zagat said “a year or two from now, we think Facebook will be mostly video.” Now, Facebook is testing new video-specific features, like the new video section and immersive VR-like 360-degree video in the hopes of making moving pictures an even more prominent part of the Facebook experience. Behind it all, a question lingers: what will this mean for Google’s YouTube, which until now has been the unchallenged king of video on the web? People watch a lot of video online—a Millward Brown study this week found that Gen Xers watch as much digital video as TV, much like millennials and teens do. Earlier this year, I wrote that Facebook isn’t a threat to YouTube yet, mostly because, well, Facebook users use Facebook differently than they use YouTube. You probably use Facebook to see what’s happening in the world, whereas you head to YouTube to hang out to watch videos. Facebook, however, seems keen on narrowing that divide. While video remains something you might stumble upon in your feed, the tech company wants to make video a destination and make it easier for you to find what you want. It wants its 1.49 billion users to think “Facebook” when they want to watch videos. For YouTube, the time to sound the alarms may have finally arrived. “Video on Facebook has so far not been a problem for Google as almost all of it has been shared to Facebook via YouTube,” says Richard Windsor, an analyst at Edison Investment Research. “This has meant that Google has still had access to the data generated from users watching videos within their News Feeds.” But over the past 18 months, such cross-linking has shrunk radically, Windsor says. He reports that 70 percent of videos on Facebook are being uploaded directly compared to just 25 percent in early 2014. Facebook isn’t just coming for YouTube. It’s starting to catch up. In an effort to make video-viewing more compatible with the scroll-y nature of the News Feed, Facebook is testing other features that mimic YouTube’s. Find yourself wanting to skip videos because you don’t want to pull out your headphones on the bus? No worries, Facebook is testing a “Saved” bookmark so you can come back to videos later. (YouTube lets you do that, too.) Want to multi-task on Facebook? The company is testing a way for you to watch videos in a “floating screen” in the corner as you scroll through the rest of your feed. (YouTube has been there, done that.) The company has also, unsurprisingly, been working on suggesting videos similar to ones you’ve already seen in the past. (Remind you of anything?) The company says that the tests show that people to whom it’s made the suggested video feature available are watching more new videos, which is exactly what Facebook wants. It’s also exactly what advertisers want. “Facebook and Google are currently running neck and neck when it comes to spending by advertisers on digital video, but all the momentum is currently with Facebook,” Windsor says. He adds that Facebook videos elicit better interaction and comments, which help advertisers better understand who they’re advertising to. Video is becoming increasingly central to our experience of the web and mobile platforms, where advertisers are anxious to reach us there. But Facebook and YouTube are not the only ones seeking to score with video online. Everyone from Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and HBO to Comcast, Verizon, and even NBC are hoping to increase the number of viewers who subscribe to their online services — or head to them first when they want to watch video. Could Facebook one day compete with these more dedicated video services, becoming, say, our new TV? “I would not be surprised to see Facebook launch a premium video offering over time,” Windsor says. Facebook, after all, wants to capture your attention for as long as it can. And you only have so much time and attention to give. Whether it means allowing you to multitask, save things for later, find the things you really want to watch, when it comes to video, Facebook will be there for you, the company says. As your News Feed morphs into a never-ending stream of videos, turning Facebook into a “dedicated place” for TV and films starts to make a whole lot of sense. =~=~=~= Atari Online News, Etc. is a weekly publication covering the entire Atari community. Reprint permission is granted, unless otherwise noted at the beginning of any article, to Atari user groups and not for profit publications only under the following terms: articles must remain unedited and include the issue number and author at the top of each article reprinted. Other reprints granted upon approval of request. Send requests to: dpj@atarinews.org No issue of Atari Online News, Etc. may be included on any commercial media, nor uploaded or transmitted to any commercial online service or internet site, in whole or in part, by any agent or means, without the expressed consent or permission from the Publisher or Editor of Atari Online News, Etc. Opinions presented herein are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the staff, or of the publishers. All material herein is believed to be accurate at the time of publishing.