YouTube has been quite busy with rolling out new features to facilitate more stickier usages at the same time present the site as a Complete Social Network. We notified you regarding the trending topics adopted by Youtube although YouTube at the same time also unveiled some mind-numbing features including Activity Stream, largely ignored by blogosphere.
Feature Additions by Youtube:
Friend suggestions:
YouTube has started rolling out friend suggestion features on its homepage. The suggestions are provided by looking at the e-mail addresses used by users in sharing videos. It has also notified that it would soon roll out suggestion feature based out of Gmail Contact List.
Activity Stream:
YouTube would now support activity feed for Users subscribing to others. Earlier only upload activity was showcased in stream but now even the favorites, ratings, comments, etc of the users would be streamed .
It clearly signals the emerging Social networking landscape on YouTube.
Watch Videos in High Quality :
YouTube has also introduced a permanent playback setting to play all videos in high quality, so that users can enjoy the wide player experience without having to change the setting video-after-video.
Resume Feature:
This is the mother of all feature as Users can now resume videos without any need to keep the tab open. So Let’s say you’re watching a lengthy video (longer than 20 minutes) and you get distracted and click away. The next time you return to the video, it will resume where you left off watching, assuming you’ve watched more than one minute of the video and there are more than three minutes left.
These all feature additions, points to a fact that Google wants to build a full-fledge social network around YouTube as it hardly has any competitive product in Online Social Networking Arena apart from Orkut-major presence in Asia & Latin Markets. The social networking approach might help it to bring stickiness to usage on the Video Portal and could thus help it to monetize it well in future.
