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Google has announced that YouTube users will now have access to in depth statistics for their videos.

Stats include how often videos are viewed in different geographic regions and how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time. The lifecycle of videos is tracked, including how long it takes for a video to become popular, and what happens to video views as popularity peaks.

To access the statistics, users click on the “About this Video” button under My account > Videos, Favorites, Playlists > Manage my Videos.

It’s like the Justice League of social media: Google, Yahoo, and News Corp.’s MySpace.com announced on Tuesday that they have formed the OpenSocial Foundation, a nonprofit group to support the OpenSocial initiative that Google kick-started last year to promote a universal standard for developer applications on social-networking sites.

The OpenSocial Foundation is expected to be formed within 90 days, with more OpenSocial partners from across the Web on board in addition to the three responsible for the announcement.

The specific purpose of the new nonprofit, according to a release, is “to ensure the neutrality and longevity of OpenSocial as an open, community-governed specification for building social applications across the Web.” It’s a particularly crucial move for Google, which has been eager to emphasize that OpenSocial is a community standard, not a Mountain View project.

“OpenSocial has been a community-driven specification from the beginning,” Joe Kraus, Google’s director of product management, said in a joint statement from the three companies. “The formation of this foundation will ensure that it remains so in perpetuity. Developers and websites should feel secure that OpenSocial will be forever free and open.”

Indeed, the OpenSocial Foundation will be an independent entity with its own intellectual property and governance policies. Related assets are expected to be in place by the beginning of July.

Google first announced OpenSocial in October as a response to the plethora of announcements on behalf of social-networking sites that they would follow in Facebook’s footsteps and create developer platforms of their own. With so many disparate developer strategies, the social-media landscape could grow even more fragmented, and Google launched the OpenSocial API (and later the Social Graph API) as a means to provide some connectivity. Major players like MySpace, LinkedIn, Bebo, and Plaxo, along with a host of smaller social networks and many that are unknown in the U.S., all opted to participate in the new initiative.

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Microsoft will most likely increase its initial $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo, according to a Citigroup Investment Research analyst.

“We believe that a Yahoo sale to Microsoft — at a price higher than the initial $31 [per share] bid — is the most likely outcome,” said analyst Mark Mahaney in a research note Monday.

Yahoo’s board of directors rejected Microsoft’s initial offer saying it undervalued the company.

Mahaney added that the limited combined market share of the two companies would also allow the deal to get the thumbs up from governmental regulators.

Citigroup also raised its price target on Yahoo’s stock to $34 from $31, saying that the new target price reflected its belief that Microsoft would increase its bid for the company.

“We think the strategic value of Yahoo to Microsoft is very significant,” Mahaney said.

Mahaney said Microsoft is unlikely to walk away from the deal because it has yet to make significant inroads in the area of online advertising, especially against market leader Google, despite efforts to do so for the past three to four years. The only way Microsoft could compete with Google would be to acquire Yahoo, the analyst said.

Mahaney said Yahoo is aggressively pursuing other alternatives to Microsoft’s unsolicited takeover bid, although he doesn’t see any competing bidders for the company.

However, one possibility would be to tie up with Time Warner, whereby Time Warner would contribute its online content to Yahoo in exchange for a stake in the company, he said.

“We believe this could serve as a forcing function to a higher Microsoft bid,” Mahaney said.

When contacted for comment, a Yahoo spokeswoman said, “Yahoo’s board and management team are carefully evaluating all of the company’s strategic alternatives and will pursue the best course of action to maximize long-term value for shareholders.”

A Microsoft spokesman referred Computerworld to the company’s press Web site for information on the deal.

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Yahoo said Tuesday that it would joining an alliance to be led by Google, its principal rival, that will try to make it easier for programmers to write software that can run on the pages of many social networks and other Web sites.

Google announced on Tuesday that it would give up control of the alliance and turn it over to a nonprofit foundation. Google, Yahoo and MySpace, another member of the group, will be among founding members of the group, the OpenSocial Foundation.

The addition of Yahoo broadens the potential reach of the foundation. The group is working on standards that will let developers create programs that can run on any social network or Web site that embraces them. Such programs might, for example, allow users to let friends know the music or movies they enjoy.

The creation of the OpenSocial alliance last fall was widely seen as a response by Google and others to the growing power of Facebook, which has persuaded thousands of outside developers to build applications for its site. Those applications have helped bolster Facebook’s popularity.

The creators of many of the most popular Facebook applications have since said they plan to adapt their programs to be compatible with OpenSocial.

Although Google is not a major force in social networking, its rivalry with Facebook appears to be intensifying. Facebook, for instance, has signed an advertising partnership with Microsoft and has recruited several prominent programmers and executives from Google, including Sheryl Sandberg, who became Facebook’s chief operating officer.

A Facebook spokeswoman, Brandee Barker, said it would not be part of OpenSocial. “Facebook is not joining this foundation, but the company remains focused on advancing Facebook Platform to benefit the developer community and help users communicate and share information more efficiently,” Ms. Barker said.

Yahoo considered joining the alliance for months, according to a person with direct knowledge of its plans. But Yahoo executives worried that Google might exert too much control over the evolution of the alliance and over any intellectual property it created, that person said.

In a conference call with reporters, Google and Yahoo executives dismissed the idea that the decision to put OpenSocial in the hands of a foundation was a response to Yahoo’s concerns.

Joe Kraus, director of product management at Google, said the foundation represented “more an evolution of where OpenSocial is heading” than a response to concerns raised by any one member. And Wade Chambers, vice president for platforms at Yahoo, praised Google’s stewardship of the standard so far.

The foundation, to be created within 90 days, will “ensure the neutrality and longevity of OpenSocial as an open, community-governed specification for building social applications across the Web,” the companies said.

Yahoo gave no details on when or how it would adopt the OpenSocial standards. So far, only MySpace and Orkut, Google’s social network, have introduced OpenSocial, Mr. Kraus said.

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Software giant Microsoft warned on Friday that some customers have reported detecting attacks using Microsoft Word and a previously unknown vulnerability in Microsoft’s Jet database engine.

The attack uses an e-mail message with two attachments — a Word file and a Microsoft Jet database file — although Microsoft is investigating whether other programs could also be used, the company said in a security advisory published on Friday. While the software giant has stated that Microsoft database files (.mdb) should be considered unsafe, and do not execute automatically, under the attack conditions described in the latest attacks the database files does execute, security firm McAfee stated in its research blog.

“Up until recently attackers typically exploited MS Jet DB vulnerabilities through MDB files, and therefore Microsoft stuck to their ‘MDB files are unsafe’ story — well, that’s changed,” Craig Schmugar, senior antivirus researcher at security firm McAfee, wrote in the post.

Flaws in Microsoft’s Office productivity applications have become standard weapons for fraudsters conducting targeted attacks aimed at high-level managers and executives. While ten or fewer high-severity flaws were reported in the five major component applications of Microsoft Office each year from 2002 to 2006, at least 26 high-severity flaws were reported in Office applications last year, according to data from the National Vulnerability Database. Earlier this month, Microsoft patched a dozens flaws in Office applications.

Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office have been used in industrial espionage and in attacks on government systems.

Microsoft is currently working on producing a patch for the flaw. The company recommended that companies either restrict Microsoft Jet Database from running or block .mdb files from being sent as attachments.

The vulnerability does not affect computers running Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2, Windows Vista, and Windows Vista Service Pack 1, the company stated.

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Electronic Arts Inc said on Monday that Chief Financial Officer Warren Jenson will leave the video game publisher, which is pursuing a hostile takeover of rival Take-Two Interactive Software Inc.

Electronic Arts did not give details on the reasons for his departure, but said Jenson will stay on board to help the company close its fiscal year and financial reporting. A replacement will be named shortly, it said.

Jenson has served as CFO since 2002 and helped shepherd the company through a U.S. regulatory probe of the company’s stock option grant accounting. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ended its inquiry into the company’s options practices in November, with no enforcement action taken.

Jenson said in a statement that it was “time for me to write the next chapter in my career.”

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No sooner does Google exit the FCC’s 700Mhz spectrum auction with its $4.6 billion still in its pocket and its rules imposed on its competitors than it throws up yet another ball in the broadband wireless game. Earlier today, it proposed to the FCC that the unused “white spaces” in television broadcast signals which will be freed up as a result of the transition to digital TV should be converted into unlicensed spectrum for long-distance wireless broadband applications. This spectrum could become a “Wifi 2.0″—free, unlicensed, and able to reach much farther than WiFi can today.

The white spaces Google is talking about are parts of the television spectrum that offered extra headroom for channels 2 to 51. Since digital TV signals are more efficient than analog signals, that buffer will no longer be necessary after February, 2009 (when the conversion to digital sets is mandated in the U.S.). So what to do with the extra spectrum? Google is saying give it away and see what happens.

That is not a bad idea. Look at what happened with WiFi. It became so popular and useful precisely because nobody had to bid billions of dollars just for the right to build out a network. Also, it is not clear how much the government would be able to raise even if it did try to auction off the white space. The spectrum is not as clean as the (separate) 700 MHz spectrum that was just auctioned off for $19.6 billion. There are more interference issues. But Google and other tech companies, including Dell and Microsoft, argue that those issues can be solved more or less.

Google also wants as many companies as possible to build Android phones and wireless devices for as many of those networks as possible so that even more people can search the Web and use Google applications when they are not sitting in front of their computers.

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