YouTube Leverages Facebook Connect for Real-time Video Sharing

YouTube has had the ability to connect with your Facebook account for quite some time now, but hasn’t really done anything interesting with the Facebook Connect technology until now. Up until this point, you could connect your YouTube account with Facebook for the purpose of connecting with your Facebook friends on YouTube. You could also use FB Connect to activate the AutoShare feature, which automatically posts videos to your other social media accounts based on your activity on YouTube.

Now, when you visit the YT homepage, you’ll find a prominent invitation to connect your Facebook account under the Recent Activity module. This will give you the ability to see what videos your friends are sharing on Facebook.

Less known is that the YouTube homepage can show you the YouTube videos your friends are sharing on Facebook; we’ve kept this under the radar while we’ve ramped up support. But now, when you log in to your YouTube account, you’ll get a prominent invitation in the Recent Activity module (see below) to connect to Facebook, which we highly recommend that you do. In fact, we hope to integrate more social networks with YouTube going forward: knowing which videos your friends are sharing on social platforms is one of the best ways to discover those clips that you, in turn, just might feel compelled to pass along.

This feature has been in testing for some time now, and has experienced a few tweaks along the way. Most importantly, instead of videos taking upwards of 10-minutes to show up after being shared, it only takes a few seconds. This is where the real-time attribute comes in. Nobody likes waiting and YouTube is making sure you don’t have to.

What is interesting about this move is that YouTube just recently trashed their own real-time efforts. You might recall the YouTube Real-time toolbar that was tested for a little while. They just recently dumped the entire thing, presumably because no one was using it. When I covered it last week, I speculated that it didn’t take off because, while YouTube is one of the most visited sites on the Internet, it’s just not built on a strong social network. People go there to watch videos and, when they do share videos, they send them to 3rd party sites like Facebook and Twitter. It looks like the folks at YouTube came to the same conclusion I did and decided, instead, to leverage the largest social network on the Internet, instead.

About the Author
Rahsheen has been a certified geek since before it was the thing to do. He started programming and tinkering in the 4th grade. Now, Rahsheen mostly writes on various sites about technology trends in social media and mobile. . He is also a musician, singer, rapper, writer, and producer. @rahsheen - +Rahsheen Porter - coachrah.com
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