YouTube is a huge social network in its own right. It has over a billion active users of which half of them use it on mobile while spending an average of 40 minutes per session. It has become a household name where when you want to watch video online, the first website that comes to mind is YouTube.
It seems now YouTube wants to make sure people treat it as a proper social network as WIRED reports where they launched a feature which allows you to chat and share with people right on YouTube. Apparently, it will allow people to invite their friends into conversation threads where they can talk about a certain video right within YouTube. In the spirit of conversation, your friends can also reply within the thread with another video. The conversation threads have been given a new tab on the mobile so that you can catch up with conversations or add new information.
What YouTube seems to be aiming here is letting people share videos enmass within YouTube, which is unlike what we do currently. Generally, people share YouTube videos on other social networks within chats and now YouTube wants to change all that. Shimrit Ben Yair, YouTube’s director of product management was quoted by the publication as saying it was developed in a way to make sure people share YouTube videos natively, which makes sense from the social network angle.
This is a good way of keeping the already huge audience YouTube has engaged and has the potential to drive up the total time spent on the network. Apparently, the feature is only limited to a few users right now so we only have to wait.v
