Monday, 1 August 2011

Putting the You back into YouTube

One of the killer features of Google+ has to be Hangouts. Hangouts allows you to initiate a video chat with upto 10 people - this is the functionality that could really put Google+ ahead of Facebook in the Social Media war. Facebook of course have also rolled out functionality that allows you to talk to your friends using Skype within Facebook, but in my view the Hangouts functionality is by far superior.

Early indications are pretty encouraging for Google, with Michael Dell being a big fan and he is even talking about using Hangouts for customer service for Dell. This is merely one example of how this could be used by various people. I have envisaged one potential use for myself being the ability to start a work circle related hangout and then I can essentially have a conference with people in different geographic locations. This could really add a big boost to the off-shoring model - hangouts gives companies a cheap and easy way to communicate with their off-shored staff and make everyone feel like they are part of one global team and get a lot of "face time" with different employees.

Another use for hangouts could be to do live press conferences. Of course there is the problem of the 10 users per hangout , but there is already sites where a hangout can be streamed to reach a wider audience e.g. Googlecircus.com . Of course the ideal solution would be for Google to allow a feed of a Hangout to be broadcast live to YouTube so that non participants can just view the live Hangout event. Add some record functionality to the YouTube feed and you really have a very compelling product. Imagine how aspiring musicians could use this to reach a wider audience. I can also see this being used for delivering training courses, teaching etc.

Ultimately I am sure Google will create this link to YouTube, it is such a obvious move for the company. And once they do it it really could put the You back in YouTube.

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