April 25, 2009

YouTube RealTime Sharing

YouTube has always been a social network, but the interactions between users are limited. Last year, YouTube started to broadcast activity streams and you could see on the homepage the latest videos uploaded by your friends, their latest comments and ratings.

To make the activity streams more useful, YouTube decided to expand the actions that are shared and to show them in a persistent toolbar at the bottom of the page. The feature, dubbed RealTime YouTube, requires an invitation from a friend who already has it.

The RealTime toolbar shows a list of friends that are currently online, their recent activities and notifies when one of your friends posts comments or rates videos. For example, you can now see all the videos currently watched by your friends.


The toolbar lacks some features that would make it really useful: chatting with your friends and watching videos at the same time. You can disable the real-time sharing and it's also possible to hide the toolbar from YouTube's settings.

If you already have the RealTime toolbar, you can send invitations to 25 of your friends. A simple way to both invite YouTube users to become your friends and to send an invitation for the toolbar is to use the YouTube Peeps link, which is only active for 15 minutes. To get an invitation, monitor the search results for youtube.com/peep on Twitter and click on a recent invite link.

Real-time interfaces become increasingly popular as people no longer want to wait for updates: Twitter's real-time search, FriendFeed's new interface and YouTube RealTime show what's happening right now.

"An overwhelming sense of restlessness and impatience engulfed the U.S. this week when citizens determined that everything — the morning commute, phone conversations, getting a table at Chili's, making coffee, commercial breaks, everything — was taking entirely too long," reported The Onion last month. "According to the latest time estimates, if everything continues to move along at this intolerable pace, Americans will be left with no other choice but to scream."
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13 comments:

  1. crumlin blinds dublinApril 27, 2009 at 4:57 AM

    ah, the impatience of modern society in a james gleich age

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  2. CarlosPCApril 27, 2009 at 8:22 AM

    Are you really using The Onion as a source of serious opinion? o_0

    ReplyDelete
  3. ResveratrolApril 30, 2009 at 11:37 PM

    All of youtube is very slow for me right now, as in, not connecting slow...

    ReplyDelete
  4. Colon CleanseMay 1, 2009 at 12:16 AM

    You tube is really very very slow. If you have to go look a video of 5 min to for buffering it need aprox 15 min. I think these guys should do something for this as well.

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  5. AnonymousMay 1, 2009 at 6:51 PM

    i wish i could use youtube real time. does anybody know when youtube real time will have the full version of this. i want to use this and everybody does too.

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  6. AnonymousMay 2, 2009 at 8:34 PM

    I personally do not like this YouTube RealTime Sharing ToolBar. I have tried for hours removing this thing and it keeps coming back after I log back into my account. I followed some of the help files on hiding the toolbar and it does go away, until I log back into YouTube and the toolbar returns. I would like to perminitely remove this feature 100% Has anyone else had this problem. Thank You.

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  7. AnonymousMay 3, 2009 at 6:35 PM

    I want many more features added to this, right now its useless..

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  8. kem21loveMJ29May 4, 2009 at 11:37 PM

    how do I disable it? cause i dont like to use this one, but I got invited

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  9. AnonymousMay 5, 2009 at 2:08 PM

    It doesn't work with google chrome i think which doesn't make sense because google bought youtube

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  10. Blacke VelvetMay 15, 2009 at 8:51 AM

    Invite me! I want to try it out. It sounds interesting:) http://youtube.com/jrthegreat1

    ReplyDelete
  11. AnonymousJune 8, 2009 at 8:38 PM

    I think it's a load of crap. It doesn't do anything for me but take up space on my display.

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  12. AnonymousJuly 7, 2009 at 9:22 AM

    if anyone want to invite me, username dileask

    ReplyDelete
  13. huiyinhsuJuly 8, 2009 at 8:33 AM

    i have 25 invites. search me on youtube - huiyinhsu

    ReplyDelete

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