It is exactly what the title says. In a rather unexpected move, Youtube is getting a new feature which lets you share your favorite videos with your friends without having to copy-paste the video link. The video streaming giant is making this a reality by introducing an in-built messaging feature right inside the official apps.
Wired reports that YouTube doesn’t want to disrupt your video sharing experience, so its testing a native sharing feature with a small percentage of users. Using the new messenger that resides in a new sharing tab on the YouTube mobile app, users can now share videos with their friends with just a tap of a button. Users can move in and out of these group conversations easily and even catch up on what they’ve missed later. It also offers users the capability to not only reply with a text, but with another video(duh, its YouTube!).
Shimrit Ben-Yair, director of product management at YouTube says that,
The feature was developed after her team hypothesized that a streamlined native way to share YouTube videos would result in more sharing—which is exactly what YouTube wants.
But how do you utilize it right now (since the feature has limited testers) if your friends aren’t on the platform to share the videos with?
You have nothing to worry! If you have the native messenger working on your YouTube app, you can easily invite your friends to enjoy the new feature and join you in the conversation. The service has been the king of video content online for some time now, but a social network is disrupting its peace — hence the vice-versa move.
The company is facing a tough competition from Facebook, Snapchat, along with newer services coming, specially the likes of Amazon Prime. With Facebook’s growing user-base and its focus on current video and Live video content, YouTube is finally taking steps to capture the interest of users back on its own platform.
We can’t really comment how successful this experiment will be, but it will definitely drive the teens away from Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook for a while. And maybe help them make some new friends(with similar interests) in the process.
