San Francisco — A new social-media-friendly feature has just been added to YouTube. The Google owned popular video-sharing site has been silently incorprating new features into its video sharing service. YouTube announced yesterday that it now allows users to automatically send updates and more easily share their new uploaded videos on Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader.
In a blog post on the Facebook developer blog, Josh Elman writes that, “When logged into Facebook and YouTube, users can now automatically publish and share the videos they upload to YouTube directly to Facebook.” It is interesting to see a Google owned company take advantage of Facebook Connect considering the company’s investment in making their other social standards more widespread.
YouTube is not the first video site to incorporate with Facebook. According to TechCrunch, this means that users will be able to syndicate content into friends feeds and users are able to link their accounts on YouTube’s “Upload” page. Meanwhile this for now is limited to newly uploaded content, it seems likely that the comprehensive features will be rolled out to encompass all content eventually.
YouTube’s Video File Upload page will now show AutoShare options with list of services — Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader. Although the feature is similar to the one that was revealed earlier by the video sharing site, it is particularly noteworthy for its engagement with Twitter — currently the hottest property in the social media market. As TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid points out, this is going to have a massive impact on Twitter’s existing video sharing services.
Facebook Connect currently reaches millions of users and while the exact number of users that have logged in using Facebook Connect is not known, the number has to be well over 5 million at this point considering the large services they have integrated with. So, whenever the user uploads a new video successfully, the update about the same is syndicated to the services selected in the AutoShare options.
This automatic feature of the service are sure to be a favourite with busy social media darlings keen to share their content over as many platform as possible. Like links to photos are being shared on Facebook and Twitter, videos are going to be next phenomenon.
Last month, YouTube boasted about 20 hours of video being uploaded every minute on the video sharing service. And the fact that Google is keenly playing nice with Facebook into the bargain is interesting news indeed, considering the long-running rivalry. The search giant may have finally seen the opportunity to make the most of Facebook’s extensive friend network arise.