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The image accompanying this post is encoded with JPEG compression, a standard which, while it has been improved somewhat, has been more or less in its present form for almost two decades now. Over those two decades, images have changed their role on the web dramatically, and consequently the number and quality of images on the web have been increasing exponentially. Yet the way we make those images easy to share and transmit hasn’t caught up with the times.

Increases in bandwidth, it must be said, have made the matter one of very little urgency, and it’s important to admit that it takes less time to load a content-rich webpage (our front page averages 1-1.5MB) than it did to load a barebones page in the old days. But even so, it’s just as true that images take up the bulk of the bandwidth and making them more efficient means making the web more efficient. It looks like Google is trying to do just that with its new WebP image format.

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Facebook has established itself as the biggest photo sharing service on the Internet — by far. But until fairly recently, the maximum size of uploaded photos was a frustratingly small 604 pixels, doing nothing to take advantage of the increasing ubiquity of high-resolution cameras. And that’s a problem when your friends are using Facebook as the primary way to share memories of special events like weddings, graduations, parties, and chubby bunny contests.

Things started to improve in March which it boosted the maximum resolution 20% up to 720 pixels. And now the Photos app is getting much, much better: Facebook is boosting the maximum photo size by 8x, up to 2048 pixels. Now you won’t have to squint when you go to relive your memories a few years (or decades) down the line. This may also make the app more attractive to users who have been turning to Flickr for high-quality uploading.

In addition to the boost in maximum photo size, Facebook is also making some UI changes. The site is going to start rolling out a new light box-based photo viewer that lets you view photos without jumping between pages. Facebook has also improved its UI for tagging friends, making it easier to tag the same person in multiple photos. Finally, Facebook has once again rebuilt its photo uploader for stability and performance improvements.

The features aren’t live for everyone yet, and will be rolling out over the next few weeks.

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comScore just released its latest online video data in the U.S. for the month of August; showing that viewership remained steady since the previous month. According to comScore, 178 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content in August for an average of 14.3 hours per viewer (178 million users watched online video in July as well). The total U.S. Internet audience engaged in more than 5.2 billion viewing sessions during the course of the month and 85.1 percent of internet users in the U.S. viewed online video in August

Unsurprisingly, YouTube.com took the stop spot in terms of viewers, with 146.3 million unique viewers. Facebook.com jumped one position to capture the #2 spot with 58.6 million viewers, for a total of 243 million viewing sessions, continuing on its growth in video viewership and surpassing Yahoo. Yahoo came in third with 53.9 million viewers, followed by VEVO with 45.4 million. Google Sites in total had the highest number of overall viewing sessions with 1.9 billion and average time spent per viewer at 270 minutes, or 4.5 hours.

Americans viewed more than 3.8 billion video ads in August, up from 3.6 billion July. Hulu generated the highest number of video ad impressions at 790 million, followed by BrightRoll Video Network with 469 million ad views. Video ads reached 45 percent of the total U.S. population an average of 28 times during the month.

Hulu delivered the highest frequency of video ads to its viewers with an average of 30 over the course of the month. The top video ad networks in terms of their potential reach of the total U.S. population were: Break Media at 46.4 percent, BrightRoll Video Network at 45.0 percent, and ScanScout Network at 44.5 percent (Hulu isn’t included in this because it is not a standalone video ad network).

The average duration of the average online content video was 4.8 minutes, while the average online video ad was 0.4 minutes. And video ads accounted for 10.7 percent of all videos viewed and 1.0 percent of all minutes spent viewing video online.

It’s no secret that Facebook’s video viewership and content is growing by leaps and bounds. And it’s pretty impressive that the social network has more viewers online than content and media sites like NBC, Fox and Turner.

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Talk to an Android developer about their biggest gripes with the platform, and one the the top bullets on the list — probably even higher than the fragmentation issue — is that fact that Android Market has had weak support for international users.

Up until now developers in only nine countries were able to sell paid applications, and many international users haven’t been able to purchase applications either. Today, Google is announcing some big improvements on this front: developers from 29 countries will now be able to sell applications (a boost of 20 countries), and in the next two weeks it’s increasing the number of countries that support purchases from 14 to 32.

In other words, this means a big jump in the number of people who can develop paid apps, and it also means that the potential market size is going to be significantly larger, which is great news for all Android developers. We first broke the news about these impending changes earlier this week, but at the time Google wasn’t confirming how many countries were being added.

Support for paid application sales is now expanded to developers in 29 countries, with today’s additions of Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland and Taiwan.

In addition, Android Market users from 32 countries will be able to buy apps, with the addition of Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Israel, Mexico, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Sweden, and Taiwan.

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Google’s URL shortener just opened up to the public, with a standalone site. Launched last December, Google’s Bit.ly competitor, Goo.gl can now be used for any links on the web. And Google promises that the shortener is the “stablest, most secure, and fastest URL shortener on the web.”

From the blog post:

There are many shorteners out there with great features, so some people may wonder whether the world really needs yet another. As we said late last year, we built goo.gl with a focus on quality. With goo.gl, every time you shorten a URL, you know it will work, it will work fast, and it will keep working. You also know that when you click a goo.gl shortened URL, you’re protected against malware, phishing and spam using the same industry-leading technology we use in search and other products. Since our initial release, we’ve continued to invest in the core quality of the service:

Stability: We’ve had near 100% uptime since our initial launch, and we’ve worked behind the scenes to make goo.gl even stabler and more robust.
Security: We’ve added automatic spam detection based on the same type of filtering technology we use in Gmail.
Speed: We’ve more than doubled our speed in just over nine months.

The new URL shortener also comes with a host of interesting features. For example, if you sign-in to your Google Account, you’ll can access a list of URLs you’ve shortened in the past. And you can see the details the “details” link next to any of shortened URL, where you will find public, real-time analytics data, including traffic over time, top referrers, and visitor profiles.

There’s no API available…yet. But Goo.gl is available via extensions for Chrome and Firefox. Google says an upcoming API can be used to shorten URLs, expand URLs, and view analytics from directly within your own applications.

Twitter also released its URL shortener not too long ago, and Facebook is testing its offering as well. That being said, Bit.ly, the startup playing in the space, is seeing enormous traction despite all of these competitors.

More: Goo.gl’s Awesome Easter Egg To Instantly Turn Any Link Into A QR Code

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