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YouTube Plans To Bring Photos, Polls, and Text To Its Video Service (venturebeat.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the backstage-pass dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: YouTube is developing a feature internally called Backstage where users can share photos, polls, links, text posts, and videos with their subscribers. Backstage is expected to launch by the end of the year, possibly this fall, on mobile and desktop, initially with select popular YouTube accounts and with limited features, VentureBeat has learned. Akin to a Facebook Timeline or Twitter profile, Backstage will live alongside the Home and Videos tabs within individual YouTube channels. Posts shared to Backstage will appear in reverse chronological order, and, crucially, will also appear in subscribers' feeds and notifications, making them highly visible to fans. While Backstage is expected to introduce entirely new types of content to YouTube, including tweet-like text posts and topical polls, it also presents new opportunities for video sharing. Backstage will eventually enable users to share both traditional YouTube videos and Backstage-only videos, possibly creating an opportunity for more intimate, or even ephemeral, video sharing between YouTubers and their fans.

8 of 22 comments (clear)

  1. Everything to everyone by TroII · · Score: 4, Insightful

    These days it seems like every service is very busy trying to be every other service, and it only winds up hurting their primary product. Instagram wants to be Snapchat (or is it vice versa) with "Stories," Facebook wants to be a messenger program, Twitter wants to be Vine so they added short videos, Firefox wants to be Chrome, and now YouTube wants to be Reddit. Enough with the fucking e-penis-envy already. Make your product and make it well.

    --
    "If there was a gay Afro-Puertorican Linux distribution, I'd give it a try" ~lucm
    1. Re:Everything to everyone by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      Indeed. The suits get nervous and catch featuritus. In my opinion Youtube should improve its existing commenting feature. It's hard sift and re-find comments if there's a lot per vid, for example. And the reply notifier is buggy.

      Forget about being a blog/photo/texting gizmo. You lost that battle already.

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
  2. Video replies. by sims+2 · · Score: 2

    Are they going to bring back video replies?

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    Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
    1. Re:Video replies. by sexconker · · Score: 4, Informative

      No. It stopped being YOUtube long ago.

  3. Re:Casey Neistat by epyT-R · · Score: 1

    The reason they do that is because morons keep clicking those vids..

  4. So...... by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 1

    So Youtube is going to turn into some bastardized version of Facebook and Instagram? Yippee, I can hardly wait to stop going there.

    --
    Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
  5. I know! by ukoda · · Score: 5, Funny

    They could call it Google Plus!

  6. cluttered feed... by Rukia · · Score: 1

    I use Youtube a lot. I have unsubscribed to certain Youtubers because they release too many low quality videos mixed in with their good ones. Jim Sterling is an example, Jimquisition videos are good, most of his others are filler where he scrapes the bottom of Steam's basement. I do not need all that flooding my subscription feed so I check his videos just once a week as an unsubscribed visitor.

    I also do not subscribe to youtuber twitters because those tend to be mostly filled with more low quality garbage--I value the content in high quality videos and that's it, that is all I want in my feed. I might check a twitter directly just to find out when someone is streaming next but very rarely is there anything else worth my attention in there.

    If this change results in feed spam that subscribers do not have fine grained control over (like a checkbox to enforce 'only videos') then I expect to be unsubscribing from a number of youtubers.