Cool, innovative and contradictory. That sums up my immediate reaction to two of the latest products to come out of the Google ideas factory. The new YouTube mobile site and Google’s new App Inventor appear to take the search giant in opposite directions, seemingly reinforcing the notion that Google has a befuddled “trial and error” approach to strategy.

Google’s new HTML5-enabled YouTube mobile site is designed to eliminate the need for a native YouTube app on the iPhone and the many other smartphones that don’t support Flash – the technology YouTube’s web site has long relied on to play videos. Meanwhile, App Inventor is designed to make it as easy for ordinary folk to create Android apps as it is to create web pages.

On the one hand Google is shoring up the web, which generates the vast majority of its revenues, while on the other hand it is making it straightforward to develop apps that will compete with web pages for mobile users’ time, attention and money.

In fact, App Inventor, like Android Market, appears to be a pragmatic hedge in case the Apple-initiated mobile app phenomena derails Google’s efforts to persuade everyone to run software in the cloud (where the Internet giant is best-placed to index content and broker adverts), rather than on devices.

App Ads is where its At

With the app craze in full swing, it looks like a smart hedge. As well as strengthening the competitive position of Android, App Inventor could bolster Google’s position in the mobile advertising market. Google will likely use App Inventor to promote the AdMob app ad brokering service, just as Google’s Blogger and Sites tools, which enable amateurs to create web pages, promote its AdSense ad brokering service. If device-based apps turn out to be the future of the mobile Internet and people stop using its web search engine, Google could still be pulling many of the strings.

Ad Inventor is another weapon Google can wield to protect its core digital ad brokering business from arch-rival Apple and its iAd programme. Similarly, the new YouTube mobile site looks like a bid to reduce Apple’s leverage over Google in the mobile video market – even if Apple were to take the drastic step of removing the native YouTube app from its devices and its App Store, iPhones would still be able to access the new YouTube site.

But Google’s actions could have unintended consequences. Paradoxically, YouTube’s embrace of HTML5 to play videos could also look like a big gesture of support for Apple’s push to marginalise Adobe’s Flash technology. Probably alert to this interpretation, just a week before the launch of the new mobile YouTube site, Google published a blog post aimed at YouTube developers supporting Flash and outlining its advantages over HTML5.

In the blog post, software engineer John Harding diplomatically wrote: “We’ve been excited about the HTML5 effort and video tag for quite a while now, and most YouTube videos can now be played via our HTML5 player. This work has shown us that, while the video tag is a big step forward for open standards, the Adobe Flash Platform will continue to play a critical role in video distribution.”

In other words, my enemy’s enemy is still my friend. And Google does have a clear strategy – do whatever it takes to prevent Apple from breaking out of its large, but high-end, niche at the summit of the mobile Internet market.