Tech
Youtube tests messaging feature on its mobile app
Is expanding its interactive features the way to go to keep up with the growing competition?
MANILA, Philippines — The Google-owned video-streaming giant, Youtube, has recently released and is testing a new feature for its mobile app — a built-in messaging feature where users can share and converse about videos without leaving the app at all.
With popular social media apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat going big on the messaging and chat feature the last few years, Youtube, meanwhile, had an unsuccessful history with social networking. Back in 2013, the site tied its comment feature with now struggling social networking site, Google Plus, in an effort to clean up the site’s out of control comment section.
The feature, much like Instagram and Snapchat’s messaging service, will let users share a Youtube video directly to someone, converse in text or images, or respond with another video. This will all be located in a tab available on the app’s new update.
It will be available first to a small percentage of Youtube app users, tech magazine, Wired.com, has reported. Users who have the new feature can then spread it by inviting friends into conversation threads.
Competition is tight with Facebook and Snapchat successfully integrating and innovating ways to mesh video and social networking together. Even While Youtube remains the leading video-based application in the market, with the site having over a billion users (half of which are on mobile) where people spend an average of 40 minutes a day, it has yet to extend its native communication and sharing features.
Product management director of Youtube, Shimrit Ben-Yair told Wired that adding the in-app messaging was born out of her team’s theory that doing so would generate more native views and shares.
Youtube’s sharing features at present only include sharing links to popular social media sites that results to users eventually leaving the site to share and discuss the video. This new functionality is also set to keep users locked in on the app.
“YouTube wants internet users to think of its app as a destination they can spend time in, and not just a place they pop in and out of with a link when they’re looking for something specific,” The Verge says.
YouTube wants internet users to think of its app as a destination they can spend time in, and not just a place they pop in and out of with a link when they’re looking for something specific.
Meanwhile, tech blog Lifehacker thought the new feature has some logic to it but it was also a feature “literally no one asked for or expected.”
