Some smart video creators are pushing the boundaries of what YouTube's in-video annotations feature can do for content, creating multiple options for a story. 

One of the best examples is Deliver Me To Hell, created to promote the New Zealand-based Hell Pizza franchise. Enjoy it.

Google has unveiled a new real-time search page, google.com/realtime. It displays up-to-the-second results from sources like Twitter, Facebook, Buzz and other social networks. 

Google Real Time allows users to search for a particular topic, and see what people are saying about it in real-time.

As real-time Web exploded, other search engines, like Twitter's and Bing, became more useful for those who wanted quick access to live updates. 
 

Now Google offers phone calls over the Web to landlines or cellphones via Gmail.

The service puts Google into direct competition with Skype (124 million users worldwide). Also it makes Google a more ubiquitous part of people's social interactions by uniting the service for phone calls with e-mail, text messages and video chats.

Calls to numbers in the United States and Canada will be free at least through the end of the year. International calls are really cheap.

Gmail has offered voice and video chat for two years, but both parties must be at their computers. 

Facebook has posted its promotional video for Places feature. 
In the video, the Facebook team pitch the value of Places for enhancing everyday life. 

“The Social Network”, a movie about Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg, set for release by Sony Pictures on October 1, is already generating a huge controversy. 

The film (see the trailer above) portrays Facebook as founded on a series of betrayals in Harvard’s dorms. Zuckerberg, at 26 a billionaire, is featured as a villain and an antihero who almost created Facebook to get girls or to gain power. 

He is trying not to react angrily. “The movie is fiction,” he declared.

                            
Facebook has unveiled its “Places” functionality that allows users to share their location and find their friends. When you arrive at a place and check in, you can tag friends who are with you and post their location to Facebook.

Privacy advocates have raised flags, saying that no one can be checked in a location without their explicit permission. 

The feature is now working in the new iPhone Facebook app and in Touch.Facebook.com for advanced mobile browsers (I used it while on vacation in Spain; see the screenshot above).

It is expected that Facebook will generate massive location-based status updates. And when Facebook incorporates proximity advertising, it will generate a new era of local advertising.

Broadcasters could be forced soon to offer closed captions for any TV show they're streaming online and previously aired on TV, if U.S. Senate passes a new bill that calls for it. 

Video bloggers and smaller online studios won't have to start transcribing each and every show. 

Experts believe that broadcasters actually have a lot to gain using closed captions:

• It provides a means of access for some 36 million deaf or hearing-impaired Americans. 
• Transcripts make web video searchable, making them a natural SEO tool.
• Researchs show that video with captions are viewed 38 percent longer than videos without

There are many video platforms (Brightcove, Ooyala, Kit Digital, Amigot Interactive...) that include captioning this service. YouTube automatically transcribe videos.

Here it is worth noting that there is an interesting project called The Universal Subtitles project that crowdsource the transcription of web videos.
 

Twitter has unveiled a new feature called Tweet Button, which encourages people to share links through Twitter. (See the video above)

Web developers can add a few lines of code to their Web sites, and a small tweet icon will appear below each article. 

Earlier this year Twitter introduced its own mobile client for the iPhone and Android platform, and implemented its own URL shortening.

With these moves Twitter tries to take control of more assets within its network.