YouTube included Time Watched as Ranking Consideration

You Tube has adjusted their ranking algorithms according to the time a video has been watched.
You Tube has experimented their 'time watched reporting' with suggested videos and it gave them a positive feedback. According to this feedback, You Tube has implemented this 'Less clicking More watching Policy' as their ranking factor.

This means that if the videos are getting more viewing time, they will rank higher as compared to the videos that are getting less viewing time. This feature has been introduced to help YouTube channel owners to interpret the performance of their videos. Now channel owners will be able to analyze their videos that keep viewers more engaged.

You Tube said that they have added a new Time Watched Reporting to You Tube Analytics, so that channel owners have even more tools to evaluate the performance of their videos and channel. This will help channel owners in making great videos that their fans will love and share. And will help them (i.e. channel owners) to increase their fan base.
You Tube has added an 'Estimated Time Watched statistics' to You Tube channel owners Analytics control panel. Channel owners will find the Time Watched Statistics under the "Views" Report in the Analytics control panel.

Channel owners can now enhance their videos according to the audience views, this will help them to create and grow their fan base. Most viewed videos can help channel owners to understand which videos are more popular among audience in terms of videos watched and which videos are not that popular among audience.
According to You Tube, ranking videos in terms of clicks received will not be justified as it includes malpractices by spammers to rank their videos higher in ranking algorithms You Tube has introduced this Time Watched Statistics to reward the engaging videos which keep viewers watching.

You Tube has also updated their Annotations to Beta version to help channel owners analyze how their videos are doing in terms of audience engagement.
Annotations are the tools introduced by You Tube to help channel owners analyze the performance of their video annotations which includes click through rates of videos, lifetime view of videos and lot more.

The most popular Annotations Tools are:
1. Date Slider: You Tube has brought back the data slider with lot of new features. Now video publishers can see the performance of their videos across different time period. Video publishers can now see their video performance any day they want to see. So publishers won’t have to wait for seeing their video performance changes in weekend and other cyclical data.

2. The Metadata Section: In the Metadata section, video publishers can see their videos lifetime views and video duration.

3. The Video Hovercraft: It helps video publishers to see thumbnails of their videos. Video publishers can simple put the mouse courser over the video link to view a thumbnail image of the video.

4. Compare Metric: It helps video publishers to compare trends and patterns across two metrics or videos. This will help video publishers to get a detailed analysis among two or more videos and arrange their videos accordingly to get a higher ranking.

According to YouTube 'Time Watched Reporting' experiment provided them with a positive result so they have implemented this statistics into their ranking algorithm.
But this change in the ranking algorithms may conflict You Tube's greatness of more professional content. With this update YouTube will now unnecessarily force video publishers to stretch out their video's duration time in order to capitalize on the changes.
According to me this 'Time Watched Reporting' algorithm is bit confusing. If someone can explain matters in a 3 minutes video then it’s not worth to unnecessarily draw out that video to 15 minutes.
Which video will get higher ranking in the YouTube, a 4 minute’s video that viewers watch for 3 times or a 25 minutes video that viewers watch for lets say 18 minutes??
I have posted this question in YouTube's official blog and waiting for their reply. I will let you guys know about their reply.

What you guys think, which video will get a higher ranking in the YouTube,4 minutes video watched for 3 times or the 25 minutes video watched for 18 minutes?

Google (Gmail) Launches Free SMS Service in India

Google has launched its free SMS chat service in India. This service was first launched in some African Countries in the year 2011. Now you can send text messages to mobile phones via Gmail chat using this service. Though it took time for Google to launch this service in India where there are more than 908,358,714 mobile phone users (August 2012), but that’s ok. Gmail's free SMS service is an International SMS service of Google which supports many countries and many mobile service operators. Though according to Google all mobile operators in India support SMS chat in Gmail, but for now this service is available on 8 mobile operators in India: Reliance, Vodafone, Aircel, TATA Indicom, TATA DoCoMo, Idea, MTS, and Loop Mobile. This service is not available in GTalk right now.

Initially you can send 50 messages per day. That means you have a message limit of 50 per day and for each message send your message limit will decrease by 1.But when a user will reply to your text message sent via Gmail, your message credit will increase by 5, but limited to 50 messages per day. When you will reach the credit limit i.e. 50 messages, your account will be credited with 50 messages again after 24 hours. Google built this credit limit to discourage misuse of its SMS services for SMS marketing or spamming.
If a Gmail user sends excessive number of messages to a particular number without getting any reply from that number, Google will block that Gmail user from sending further messages to that particular number. This is done to prevent spam and abuse.
If a Gmail user does not wish to receive messages from Gmail chat, he/she can block it by simple replying to the message with the word 'BLOCK' to that particular sender. Later if they wish to receive message from that particular sender, simple reply to the message of the sender with the word 'UNBLOCK' written in it
If Gmail Chat user in India does not wish to receive any SMS from Gmail SMS Chat service, they can simple stop the service by messaging 'STOP' to +918082801060. If they wish to start the service again, they can simple message 'START' to that same number.

How to Use Gmail Chat SMS Service:

Gmail has put this SMS service into its chat box. To send SMS select a user from the chat list and then select the 'Send SMS' option. As soon as you click the Send SMS button, a pop up window will appear, type the phone number of the recipient to whom you want to send the SMS, select his name and country, then click save. Once you click on the save button, you will be directed to standard Gmail chat window where you can start sending messages.

You can also increase your SMS credit in case you run out of credit balance by sending a text message to your phone from Gmail and replying to that message from your phone. You can do it multiple times .This will increase your SMS credit balance by 5 messages every time when you reply to that Gmail message from your phone. But you may be charged by your mobile operator company for sending an outgoing SMS (i.e. you will be charged whenever you send a reply to you Gmail message from your phone)