New York — Everybody is following the same track. Even YouTube, the popular video-sharing website owned by search engine titan Google Inc., has succumbed to Twitters’ tweets! YouTube, on Thursday made some revamping, and offered few details about the updates made to the site, including a Twitter app, an upload progress bar, and launched an educational hub that taps the video channels of more than 100 colleges and universities.
You do not have to be bothered anymore with cut and paste? Now below every video if you click on the “Share” link you will find three options: MySpace, Facebook, and now you can share your favorite videos instantly to the ever popular micro-blogging site Twitter. You can also expand the box for even more sharing options, but those are the main three and Twitter was just recently added.
“Everyone is on the Twitter these days, so we have added a [share to Twitter] button under the Share options so you can easily send a video into your Twitterstream,” YouTube wrote in a blog post. “Feel free to change the pre-filled text, if you like. This was a big internal request, but we know many of you asked for it, too.”
Clicking on the Twitter button now displays a pop-up window that takes you to your Twitter account and fills in a Tweet telling your followers to “check out this video,” along with the title and URL. However, YouTube does not automatically shorten the video URL, but is working to add that functionality in the future.
Moreover, to help save your time and enable you to keep tabs on your uploads, YouTube has included a progress bar via a new Flash uploader. “Our next step will be providing the estimated video processing time for your upload,” YouTube said.
Additionally, YouTube introduced a new section of its site Thursday, named YouTube Edu, an educational hub “is a volunteer project sparked by a group of employees who wanted to find a better way to collect and highlight all the great educational content being uploaded to YouTube by colleges and universities,” YouTube said. “We will feature some of these videos on the home page on Friday and elaborate further in a separate post on that day,” according to a short blurb on the YouTube blog.
The project is the result of around a year’s effort on the part of Google employees using their 20% time for outside projects, said Obadiah Greenberg, a partner manager at YouTube. Several of the search giant’s products and services, including Google News and its social-networking site Orkut, had a similar start.
YouTube will collect videos from dozens of colleges and universities, ranging from lectures to student films to athletic events.
Spreading out the academic channels as a distinct section makes it easier for people to find and exposes scholarly content to a broader audience. “Really what we see as a value in the YouTube partnership is to extend the reach of our content on a platform that millions of people are using every day,” said Ben Hubbard, manager of webcast.berkeley, the University of California, Berkeley’s streaming-video service.
YouTube Edu will allow viewers to sort clips by school or number of views, and the schools offered content ranging from complete courses to campus events to information for prospective students.
Approximately 200 lecture-based courses in literature, history, law, engineering and other subjects are offered in their entirety through the site, Greenberg said.
Some colleges have just recently tapped into the power of YouTube to share lectures and other video. “Overall, we as a university need to enhance the kind of information about UCLA online,” said Genevieve Haines, a UCLA spokeswoman. The school’s YouTube channel started in September, with “Prom Dress Rugby” and a clip of math prodigy Terence Tao among its most popular.
Another site, Academic Earth, formally launched on Tuesday, offering lectures from Harvard, Yale, MIT and other schools.
Greenberg said the timing is a coincidence. “It just shows how exciting this is, and how hungry people are for this kind of information,” he said.
Currently, University of Minnesota commands the top spots, with videos on the science of “Watchmen” and HIV/AIDS advancements, but there are also “Advanced Finite Elements Analysis,” a lecture from the Indian Institutes of Technology, and a mass performance of University of Kansas’s alma mater among the most-viewed.
All in all it has been a pretty busy week for highbrow video.