Looking through Google’s search results, it’s obvious what side of the spectrum they chose for their results. However, color psychology goes deeper than just warm and cool. Can brightness play a factor in how people react? Google seems to be testing this theory out, as noticed by a Blogoscoped user.

The problem with researching colors for design purposes, is everyone reacts to colors in different ways. Some people are drastically affected by color and brightness, while others are able to simply look past it. Looking at the image above, the lighter colors seem less attractive to me. However, there are some looking at it who perhaps see the increase in brightness as a positive.

It will be interesting to see if Google explains their testing, but considering it’s such a subtle shift they might roll it out the door without much fanfare. Or perhaps they’ll see a negative response, and decide to eventually keep the darker tones.

What are your thoughts on the color change. Does the brighter tones give a more positive feeling, or do you prefer the darker shade?

Take the latest change to hit the search engine, which is its presentation of image search results. Here is the old look for Google image search results:

Here is the new look:

You also no longer have to click through pages of results as they are now all on one page, although page numbers are assigned to show page breaks.

Now here’s Bing’s image search. A little more white space in Bing, but essentially the same look and feel:

In addition, Google is copying Bing’s use of a mouse-over expansion of each image to give some details about the image.

All in all, I just find it interesting that while Google is the far superior engine in market share AND results, it is playing catch-up with Bing in how it presents itself. It’s not the end of the world, but it does seem like a hat-tip from Google to Microsoft, which is just not natural.

What’s your take?

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“We’re testing a new look and feel of our site among users and the response so far has been positive,” according to a MySpace spokesperson. ”As always, we’re interested in hearing feedback from our community as we roll out enhancements to the user experience and look forward to sharing more details with you in the coming weeks.”

The new profile pages feature:

Here’s a good video overview of the upgrades recorded by someone who appears to either be on speed or trying to finish really quickly so he can take a bathroom break.

YouTube also recently added features so users can share videos to Twitter, Facebook or Google Reader., as well as, Facebook Connect.

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Remember MySpace? The overhyped media sweetheart before Twitter and Facebook? Hitwise UK reports that Twitter is now the 27th most visited website in the UK. This is a complete, stunning, and utter defeat to MySpace, coming in at a distant 28th . However, the traffic trends over time look pretty alarming:

However, Twitter is not the most popular social site in the UK. That honor belongs to the reigning champ, Facebook. YouTube was #2, Bebo came in at #3, and then Twitter and MySpace.

Meanwhile, Twitter may already be on the decline as far as media coverage goes. (Then again, being featured on 60 Minutes—heck, having 60 Minutes as a member—is probably a sign you’ve jumped the hype shark.)

What do you think? How long until Twitter takes out Bebo, YouTube and Facebook? Or will its limited utility limit its growth (someday)?

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Kara Swisher of WSJ’s Boom Town interviewed Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and learned that all of this confusion is not going unnoticed by the Twitter team and they are working to minimize the issue. The first step is redesigning the home page which many people come to once they have swigged the media Kool Aid around Twitter and its importance to mankind. Swisher tells it well,

Stone said the current page is essentially confusing to the masses of people who come to it, made aware of the microblogging service by the massive media hype it has received over the last year.

People arriving at the new main homepage will be greeted by a search box, information on Twitter trends and a panoply of more specific information about how they can use Twitter.

“You can try it out without having to sign up, so you can get an idea of what Twitter is before you use it,” said Stone. “We need to do a better job of explaining ourselves to people who hear about us and then have no idea what do to.”

At this point it’s easy to say “Well, it’s about time!” but I am starting to admire the ability of Stone and others to take some time with decisions and do things that are practical rather than reactionary. Many media darling companies start to believe their own press and let the media drive their innovation. Twitter on the other hand seems to be taking some cues from Facebook in that they want to make the experience of Twitter the best it can be before they try to monetize. No mention of real time search or anything else here. Just the admission that the current home page for Twitter is crappy and they are going to change it.

Stone put it succinctly by saying

“We have to turn a lot of awareness into engagement. Our front page is not reflective of that right now.”

An additional move was made to help business folks figure out Twitter and how it can be used to their benefit. The company launched a section on their blog called Twitter 101. I gave it a quick once over and I have to admit that they did a real nice job of covering the basics in a way that the uninitiated can understand. Subjects include:

• What is Twitter
• Getting Started
• Learn the Lingo
• Best Practices
• Case Studies
• Other Resources

Now before you run off and complain that there’s nothing new being said or why can’t they provide something we didn’t already know, remember that the VAST majority of people do not get Twitter at all. This is their target for this kind of data and they do a nice job of putting it together.

Oh and who put the information together? In a blog post Stone tells us indirectly that they are not wasting a lot of that VC money.

“We coordinated with business students and writers to surface some interesting findings, best practices, steps for getting started, and case studies.”

Hey, for all of the complaining and hand wringing over Twitter’s approach to this and their approach to that it looks like they are seeing that the real growth lie ahead of them and in order to get the bigger numbers (remember the 1 billion users by 2013 number from the great Twittergate scandal?) they need to educate the masses. Having 90% of tweets coming from 10% of the users is not going to help them grow. Once the mainstream finally gets how this might work for them the real opportunity for Twitter can be realized.

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Hitwise reports a 1332% increase in web visitors on March 3rd.

Alexa–put the rotten tomatoes away–confirms this jump in traffic:

And Google Trends saw a spike in the number of people searching for “skittles.”

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Google-owned YouTube continues to experiment with additions and changes. Some of these are neat while others are partly distracting, like when YouTube shows a search box when you start an embedded video and hover over the video box. Other overlays include AdSense ads – cool, I am offered to buy “Www You Tube De” on eBay! – and creator-added links. A yellow box reading “Try YouTube in a new web browser! Download Google Chrome” is also put on many or perhaps all YouTube pages rather indifferently these days..

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The new page allows you several new ways to look at your contacts and is a big improvement over the mostly static page that Flickr previously had used.

Now you can search for contacts within your contact list and sort your conatacts in various ways.

Some of the new features don’t work for me (I can’t sort my contacts by number of uploads for example), but this probably has more to do with my unusually large number of contacts on the site.

You can also now, for the first time, see who calls you a contact in an organized way. With this new view it also makes it easier to monitor reciprocal relationships on Flickr. I suspect that this new feature will result in a lot of people on Flickr being added into reciprocal contact relationships in the next few weeks or so.

It’s been interesting playing around with these pages this morning. I’ve already found some new people to add as contacts that I hadn’t been following before. It was also interesting for me to realize that I’ve been on Flickr for 44 months now and see who were the first contacts I ever added on the site. Turns out the first contact I ever added on Flickr was SeenyaRita.

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