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Earlier this month, ICANN - the internet's global governing body - decided on an unprecedented expansion of top level domains (TLDs). This means the 21 variations of domain extensions currently available (EG: .com, .com.au, .org) are about to be monstered by what is essentially a free-for-all policy where one can select their own domain extension!

When this policy is brought into play in an estimated two years' time, McDonalds can have a domain like www.mcdonalds.mcdonalds or BBC Radio can potentially be found at www.radio.bbc. No .com, no ANYTHING standard is necessary.

Most who heard this news after the ICANN heads met in Paris for their 32nd conference replied 'Coooool', imagining all the possibilities...

But I am doubtful at how 'Coooool' this policy really is!

A domain extension gives a website a sense of belonging. .com.au stands for an Australian domain, .ca is Canadian, .cn is Chinese, and so on. The same crew at ICANN recently released .asia for Asian domain seekers and .eu for European domain seekers - with purchasers of these given a continental belonging, larger than their nation but a belonging nonetheless.

ICANN has now decided that this belonging no longer holds any value. Instead, they will allow any Tom, Dick or Harry to select their desired domain extension. In fact .tomdickorharry can be your next domain extension!

The internet is globalised enough and some things need to remain standard to give surfers an idea of who is where, and doing what. ICANN has got this policy wrong.

Since their introduction, social networking websites such as MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Orkut and Bebo (among others) have attracted millions of users; many of whom have integrated these websites into their daily routine.

There are hundreds of social networking sites that support wide ranging interests and practices. While their key technological features are consistent, the cultures that emerge around these social networking sites are varied. Some facilitate advancing pre-existing social networks and friendships, while others help strangers connect based on shared interests, political views and/or activities, etcetera. Among these websites are those which have incorporated new information and communication tools, such as mobile connectivity, blogging, and photo/video-sharing.

As the popularity of of these social networking websites grow, with millions of users all over the world, several innovations have been applied.

One of these innovations includes the ability to connect to other social networking sites, thereby allowing users to share friends, interests and likes. Google for instance, has started a drive to connect all social networking sites by building a platform which allows inter-connectivity among social networking websites. The project is dubbed as Google Open Social.

The biggest move on the social network front occurred recently, when popular social networking websites such as Friendster, Facebook and mySpace introduced applications which users can choose from and add onto their profiles. These applications may be developed by any developer, as access to APIs are readily available. With these interesting developments in social networking, web developers are learning to embrace such platforms for further development.

Web Marketers also have their eyes planted on the social networking phenomenon as these websites have become the foremost marketing tool to reach millions of users world wide. The rise of social networking represents the largest web marketing opportunity since Google.

Generating a thumbnail / screenshot of a video has many uses. Many video websites out there, including the ever popular YouTube, use this function to show a static preview of the video through a screen grab or set of screen grabs in image format. You may think it is difficult to create thumbnails from a video file. But I'm here to say 'no, it's not'!

To accomplish this task, I made use of this tool: FFmpeg. First a little information about FFmpeg. If you haven't come across this yet then you're missing out on an excellent bit of software to put in your tool kit. It can convert and stream all manner of video and audio files, it is open source (under LGPL, but with some optional GPL bits), and it is constantly being worked on and developed, thus improved.

FFmpeg's homepage is where you can grab the latest revision from SVN. If you want it for Windows, then one location I found with quite recent builds is http://ffdshow.faireal.net/mirror/ffmpeg/.

Once I had these tools installed, I was ready to begin utilising FFmpeg to convert a specific point in a video file to a thumbnail image. Using the FFmpeg documentation as resources, I eventually arrived at the following command (which should all be on one line) for generating a thumbnail:

ffmpeg -y -i /path/to/video.avi -f mjpeg -1 -ss 10 -vframes 1 -s 120x90 -an /path/to/picture.jpg

The key components of that command are:

- f mjpeg: specifies that the output should be a JPG
- ss 10: sets that image should be taken from the point 10 seconds from the beginning
- s 120x90: sets the dimension of the image that would be generated

You could use Imagemagick to resize or edit the image generated if you wish, as ffmpeg is not really designed for this.

A tip to consider if you're taking user input for the video file or output image file, then please remember to escape your variables accordingly! Use something like the escapeshellcmd() PHP function.