A Korean music video, Gangnam Style, has made a new record in most watched video in YouTube.com. On December 21 the views count had exceeded 1 Billion mark, the first in the history of YouTube and most probably the first in any online video sharing site.

At the time of this writing total page views of the video is 1,004,480,502 with 6,162,311 thumb-ups and 449,312 thumb-downs.

Some of interesting YouTube facts:

• YouTube gets more than 4 billion views on it’s videos on every single day
• Users upload some 72 hours of video every minute – that is more than 100,000 hours of videos uploaded every single day.
• YouTube also gets 800 million unique users every month.

This is an old video… but, it is still funny and still relevant so I am sharing it with you guys.

This is a funny but real wedding representing the new social networking generation. The groom by the name "Locuester" in YouTube changes his relationship status in his Facebook account and wrote in his Twitter status before even kissing his bride. Although he didn’t tell his bride about his plan, he had her phone ready, to be handed over at that time to do the same.

He wrote:

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Wedding – Facebook Status and Twitter post before the kiss

Google desperately wants to tell the world that search is not the only thing it is best at and there are various avenues it wants to jump into. Let Facebook have higher share of visitors, all Google wants is money.

Google has released its own eBookstore. The bookstore is currently US only:

Google eBooks are only available for sale to customers in the U.S. at this time … For U.S. users traveling abroad: Before you head to the airport, be sure to load and sync the ebooks you wish to have with you for continued reading without interruption.

Users from the rest of the world can still download and read the free and public domain Google eBooks.

The new Google ebookstore will compete with other online retailers like Amazon.com, Apple bookstore, and Barnes & Noble, among others.

DRM protection

For those hoping for “DRM Free” books from Google will be disappointed. Google seems to plan ahead for being “closed” with a recent purchase of Widevine, a content delivery optimization and security company. The Widevine video DRM technology might be useful for YouTube and GoogleTV. For books, Google is using Adobe’s DRM – Content Server 4 in the books sold in Google ebookstore.

New Nexus S smartphone

Google learnt a lesson from Nexus One, launched earlier this year, that Google Web store is not a store good enough to sell smartphone. Now, WSJ reports that Google is releasing another smartphone, Nexus S, developed with Samsung Electronics, to be released with a new version of the Android operating system. But this time, the phone will be sold in third-party retailers like Bestbuy starting mid-December.

That is not all, Google had also announced Chrome OS Netbook on Friday.

A 19 year-old computer science student at Stanford University, Feross Aboukhadijeh, created the YouTube Instant on Thursday and woke up Friday morning to find:

The Washington Post called to do an interview, Venture Beat put my picture on their front page, and Mashable wrote a front page story …twice. YouTube Instant also made it to the All Things Digital front page and the Hacker News home page three times.

That was not all: a Wikipedia entry in his name and a job offer from YouTube CEO Chad Hurley via Twitter. Hurley later e-mailed him to set up a meeting, which, Aboukhadijeh says was scheduled for Monday.

Feross was impressed by the Google Instant released on the very same day. He says, tt took him about three hours to complete the YouTube version of Instant.

It seems, YouTube is going to test its live video streaming capability on Monday and Tuesday in collaboration with four partner sites, according to several news sources.

USA Today, citing YouTube manager Joshua Siegel, says that YouTube will add live video to the channel pages from Howcast, Rocketboom, Next New Networks, and Young Hollywood.

With live streaming capabilities, techcrunch says, YouTube will directly compete with livestreaming services like Ustream, Justin.tv and Livestream.

Started in May of 2005, with an objective to offer users with an option to upload easily and share videos with each other, YouTube has largely been successful in the said objective.

In the last 5 years, the site has grown to become the most visited video site in the world, with over two billion views daily.  In every single minute, people upload more than 24 hours of video footage. YouTube history is well presented in the following video:

YouTube is localized in 22 countries in 24 different languages. It receives 70 percent of all its video uploads from outside the United States these days. The most popular video on YouTube is Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance”, with over 200 million views – posted below: