Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, October 1

• Daily Report: The Buy Button Heads to YouTube and Twitter: On Tuesday, YouTube said it would make it easier for advertisers to pair their ads with videos highlighting a particular product. The new feature, available in the coming months, will allow viewers to get directly to a retailer’s site with a single click. No searching required. The new feature seems to be particularly appealing on the many videos of product reviews and tutorials, a type of video that has been growing in popularity on YouTube. It also, as Hiroko Tabuchi writes, brings “a shopping element to yet another corner of the Internet, as highly trafficked websites and social networking services increasingly fashion themselves into shopping hubs.” If there was any doubt about that trend, Twitter put it to rest on Wednesday. As Vindu Goel reports, the company is making it possible to put a buy button in a tweet. “A Twitter user,” he wrote, “can then purchase the product in as few as two taps — one tap on the buy button and a second to confirm the purchase.” It has been a big week for new online ad tools and features, several of which have been announced at Advertising Week in New York. As Sydney Ember wrote on Monday, Madison Avenue might still be the heart of the advertising industry, but much of the money — and influence — is coming from Silicon Valley.

• More on the Twitter Buy Button: Twitter Makes ‘Buy’ Button Widely Available: After two years of testing, Twitter is finally making it easy for millions of merchants to sell products through a tweet. The social network announced Wednesday that its “buy now” button will be available to any merchant in the United States that uses one of three major e-commerce platforms to run its online shopping operations. A store that is a customer of Demandware, Bigcommerce, or Shopify can use the software to tweet out a link to a product that will show up with a buy button. A Twitter user can then purchase the product in as few as two taps — one tap on the buy button and a second to confirm the purchase. (The first time people buy something through Twitter, they will also have to go through a screen to provide payment and address information.) Twitter’s expansion of its buy button, which builds on a partnership with the e-commerce platform Stripe announced earlier this month, comes as competing platforms are also beginning to offer e-commerce directly from their services. On Tuesday, Google’s YouTube service announced that advertisers can now place buy buttons in other people’s videos — allowing, say, Apple to offer a way to buy an iPhone from inside a fan’s video showing the unboxing of a new iPhone (yes, there are lot of videos like that). Pinterest, Facebook and Instagram, a photo-sharing service owned by Facebook, are also testing buy buttons. Facebook isn’t so sure about Buy Buttons. Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief operating officer, said that Facebook studied the behavior of its 1.5 billion users and concluded that buy buttons should not be a high priority right now.

• More on the YouTube Buy Button: YouTube to Expand Shopping Links to More Videos: YouTube announced on Tuesday that it would introduce shopping ads on its videos that let viewers jump directly to retailers’ websites and buy the products featured in the clips. The video-sharing site, owned by Google, already lets advertisers show links to products within their own videos. But the new service would place product ads on any video on the site, like product reviews uploaded by amateur reviewers, provided the clip’s owner opts in. YouTube’s new ads bring a shopping element to yet another corner of the Internet, as highly trafficked websites and social networking services increasingly fashion themselves into shopping hubs. Sites like Pinterest and Instagram have introduced “buy button” functions that let users purchase the products that appear in the millions of posts and photos shared on their platforms each day. Google itself has pushed to become a shopping destination in an increasingly direct challenge to Amazon, currently the web’s de facto shopping search engine. YouTube’s ads seek to tap into the fast growth in product reviews and tutorials posted by users. Susan Wojcicki, the company’s chief executive, announced the change at an advertising industry event in New York. In the last year alone, viewership for product-related clips on YouTube has jumped 40 percent, she said. YouTube users have already uploaded tens of thousands of reviews of a battery-powered self-balancing skateboardlike device that retailers expect to be a hot holiday gift this year. Once the service is available in the coming months, videos from users who opt into the program, and which contain products that match YouTube ads, will display an icon in the top-right corner. Users can click on the icon to view a list of images and prices of the products featured in the video, and to jump to retailers’ websites for more reviews, information and an option to buy. YouTube matches videos with ads based on the video’s content and audience. Similar to YouTube’s AdWords service, advertisers pay only when a user clicks on a shopping ad. The site will test the ads this fall, and will offer the service to AdWords clients in the coming months, it said. For users who upload YouTube videos, the shopping ads could mean a new revenue stream, the sites said. And for viewers, YouTube promises an unobtrusive way to shop as they surf videos.

• What it’s like to ride in a Google self-driving car: Google’s cars have been trained to be extremely conservative in unusual situations. “They understand their own limitations,” said Dmitri Dolgov, principle engineer on Google’s self-driving car project, at a briefing later. “They understand that there’s something really crazy going on and they might not be able to make really good, confident predictions about the future. So they take a very conservative approach.” A few blocks away from Google I got another glimpse of the SUV’s cautious nature. A car, also with a stop sign, arrived at the intersection just after us. The Google car inched forward in two spurts. After a pause we drove through the intersection. We got through it fine, but slower than I expect most drivers would have. Soon we pull back in front of GoogleX’s building, a 14-minute ride in the books. “Manual,” calls out the female voice as our driver took control again, and turned the car off. If I was grading the SUV on our brief trek I would give it a B+. It wasn’t perfect driving, but safe and effective. Of course, our route wasn’t especially difficult. The real challenges come when pedestrians, inclement weather, construction sites and cyclists arrive.

• Microsoft, Google stand down in patent battles: Microsoft and Google have agreed to bury all patent infringement litigation against each other, the companies announced on Wednesday, settling 18 cases in the United States and Germany. In another sign of the winding down of the global smartphone wars, the companies said the deal puts an end to court fights involving a variety of technologies, including mobile phones, wifi, and patents used in Microsoft's Xbox game consoles and other Windows products. The agreement also drops all litigation involving Motorola Mobility, which Google sold to Lenovo last year while keeping its patents. However, as Microsoft and Google continue to make products that compete directly with each other, including search engines and mobile computing devices, the agreement notably does not preclude any future infringement lawsuits, a Microsoft spokeswoman confirmed.

• Sources: Jack Dorsey Expected to Be Named Permanent Twitter CEO: Jack is apparently back — for good this time. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who has been serving as interim CEO for the past three months, is expected be named the company’s new permanent CEO as early as tomorrow, although that timeframe may change, according to sources. Dorsey will apparently continue to run Square, the payments company he founded where he’s also CEO. [UPDATE: Sources said that it’s not clear if the board has officially voted on Dorsey’s appointment, because it was still settling the status of other key execs this week, most specifically revenue chief Adam Bain and CFO Anthony Noto. Bain is widely expected to become COO, although Noto may also report directly to Dorsey. Both have indicated to the board, said multiple sources, that they want Dorsey in the top job. The Twitter board also has what one source called a “Plan B” of a single serious outside candidate, although every single person I have contacted who has been considered and also contacted by the company’s recruiting firm, Spencer Stuart, said that discussions did not progress very far.] Sources added that there is likely to be some shake-up of the board too, most immediately the departure of Costolo as a director.

• Google Is Acquiring Rich Messaging Startup Jibe Mobile: Google said on Wednesday that it has acquired Jibe Mobile, a messaging startup that specialized in helping carriers build support for native video messaging into their services. The effort, designed to make video chat as ubiquitous and interoperable as text messages, is known as Rich Communications Services, or RCS. Google said it is making the purchase as part of a commitment to supporting RCS as part of its messaging strategy. “SMS carrier messaging is used by billions of people every day and enables people to reach anyone around the world, regardless of their device, carrier, app or location,” Android engineer and “minister of messaging” Mike Dodd said in a blog post. “However, the features available in SMS haven’t kept up with modern messaging apps. Rich Communications Services (RCS) is a new standard for carrier messaging and brings many of the features that people now expect from mobile messaging, such as group chats, high res photos and more.” Financial terms were not disclosed.