YouTube Is Riding The RealTime Wave (Invites Giveaways)

Everybody’s familiar with Facebook’s notification/chat toolbar? That was exactly what immediately came to my mind when I saw YouTube RealTime.  Although the beta-test invitation from YouTube did mention something about ‘fancy‘ new toolbar, so it wasn’t that much of a surprise.
Seeing the latest Wave of trend in ‘Real-Time’ platform, I guess it’s just a matter of time that YouTube joined the ‘ride‘. And what YouTube came up with is what it’s called YouTube RealTime (very .. err .. ‘descriptive’ name), which they been beta-testing since April 23rd.

Here are my impressions on the new toolbar, and at the end of the post, we will also give away ‘all’ invites that we have.

Here is how the toolbar looks like:

Similar to Facebook Toolbar, the YouTube RealTime toolbar enables you to see which of your friends are online at the same time. It will also show what your friends have been doing recently in YouTube.  It’s an activity streams which will tell you when your friend make comments, give ratings, favoriting and watching videos. Stalking Mode On :)

On this list, if you hover on one of the friend name, YouTube will show another pop-up, listing recent activities of that user.

Another part of this new feature is the sharing part.  When you are watching a YouTube video, a new tab will appear on the toolbar, called ‘Watching Now‘.  As you might’ve guessed, opening this tab will show you other users who are watching the same video as you are (if they elected to broadcast what they are watching in their privacy option).

At this point, you can also easily share the video you are watching by just clicking on the ‘share‘ button located at the right hand side of each user.  This will pop-up a small message window on your friend’s screen. Or if you really like that video, you might want to ‘Share with all online friends‘.

If at some point you want to explore ‘privately‘ you can just turn off all of these feature easily by clicking on the ‘Realtime Sharing‘ button on the toolbar.  Stealth Mode On :)

The friendship part of YouTube has always been the weakest link, at least for me.  I am currently subscribing to many users, but only a few are friends, compare to Facebook, Twitter or even Flickr.  This is probably because so far there has been no incentive to befriend someone, nothing really special happened apart from maybe the ability to notify a select list of friends only.  Now, with RealTime, there is a reason to friend somebody; instant sharing of what you are watching (read: the power to influence your friends to watch that ‘cat video’ that you really like).  I am talking about uber-viral video recommendation ‘engine’, which can be leveraged by, for example, channel owners to ‘push’ their videos quicker and to wider audiences.

Taking a leaf out of Gmail book, YouTube RealTime is invite only (at the moment).  Everyone who’s got invited can invite another 25 friends.  Though these friends must have a YouTube account already.
Or if you want to invite anybody who doesn’t have a YouTube account, AND at the same time invite them to RealTime, you can use YouTube Peeps.

If you would like an invite, just write a comment with your YouTube account or email address and we will send it your way.

No related posts.