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YouTube Adds Mobile Chat, Because Google Doesn't Have Enough Messaging Apps (venturebeat.com)

Krystalo writes: YouTube today rolled out the ability to share videos with contacts directly in its mobile app for Android and iOS. Users can chat about shared videos using text, react with emoji, like messages with a heart, reply with other videos, and invite more friends to the conversation (up to a maximum of 30 people per group message). YouTube first started testing letting groups of users share and talk about videos in May 2016. The company then pushed the feature to Canada in January 2017 as a test, since Canadians share more videos online than any other nation. After some tweaks, the Google-owned company is now pushing it out to all its Android and iOS users. "We've been improving the feature since our experiments began last year," a YouTube spokesperson told VentureBeat. "For example, we've made changes to the chat visual; and we've made the video stick to the top of the chat when scrolling down, to allow replying and chatting while watching a video; and we'll continue making improvements." With the new update, YouTube has become yet another Google messaging app, on top of Android Messages, Allo, Duo, Hangouts Chat, and Hangouts Meet.

25 comments

  1. First! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    First post.

  2. the fuck? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    WTF does that mean?

    I've been sharing youtube links over XMPP (we mostly use pidgin) with buddies for years upon years. We can then "chat about shared videos using text, react with emoji, like messages with a heart, reply with other videos, and invite more friends to the conversation", except for the emoji part, which we don't do because we aren't drooling mouth breathers left over from the AOL crowd.

    Does sending someone a youtube link somehow require special support in a chat application now? Why does any of that need to be "rolled out"?

    Did the world become stupid and unable to cut and paste a URL while I wasn't looking? Wait... don't answer that.

    1. Re:the fuck? by unixisc · · Score: 1

      On WhatsApp, I simply paste the link, and the embedded icon finds its way in.

  3. YouTube is a plague. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Seriously, just look up the top channels and how much money they make. Humanity is doomed. It's all fuelled by kids. Like kids under 10-years-old. They might be the future but they're not getting my dollars.

    1. Re:YouTube is a plague. by BitcoinVagrant · · Score: 0

      I can assure you that I am not a 10-years-old. Can I have you dollars? If yes, convert them into bitcoins and send them to me at 18awryFxpSG2C1PRHWCteoak94HfdFbnfD. Thank you.

      --
      Please donate bitcoins to 18awryFxpSG2C1PRHWCteoak94HfdFbnfD
    2. Re:YouTube is a plague. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I don't think he meant 10-years old literally, but children. If you watch any of the popular channels on YouTube, you are probably a child or at least have the mentality of a child.

      Note: I consider any under the age of 30 to be a child.

  4. QUESTION by yuriklastalov · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Is Google retarded?

    Emphatically, YES.

    Is Google evil?

    Emphatically, YES.

    Therefore Google is an Evil Retard?

    Emphatically, YES.

    That is all.

    1. Re:QUESTION by geek · · Score: 1

      I've de-googled my life for these reasons. It's surprisingly easy to do actually.

    2. Re: QUESTION by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      My Google-free life: DuckDuckGo, LibreOffice, Dropbox, Thunderbird, Protonmail, and Kodi. If I really need to YouTube something, I use mps-youtube or tonvid.com since it's basically YouTube videos but a very lightweight interface. Screw having a Google Drive account; use HubiC instead if you need the space. SketchUp is a joke compared to Blender.

    3. Re: QUESTION by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Your Google free life- Microsoft!

    4. Re: QUESTION by PoopJuggler · · Score: 2

      So you've traded a nice clean integrated suite of web and android apps for a pile of unrelated desktop apps all from different developers with no interoperability and no central design or consistency and no chance of there ever being any in the future. Congrats.

    5. Re: QUESTION by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      SketchUp and Blender are two completely different animals with two completely different purposes, dumbass.

    6. Re: QUESTION by JohnFen · · Score: 1

      Personally speaking, I don't consider that to be a very big loss. I can do data sharing between unrelated apps without a problem anyway. It's a little less convenient (but only a little), but not enough to matter.

  5. It's about time. by sheramil · · Score: 1

    Youtube comments were nowhere near stupid enough. Now that there's another channel for people to be mindless, braying morons through, perhaps we can achieve something like Peak Stupidity, which will be a valuable weapon in our coming fight against the Singularity.

  6. Only apps can app apps! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Modern app appers love apping more apps, even if the app is the same as another app, because only apps can app apps! It would take 5000 LUDDITE programs to even be 0.05% as appy as an appy app app!

    Apps!

  7. Give it up already by JohnFen · · Score: 1

    Google keeps trying to convince everyone that YouTube is "social media".

    It's not. It's a video distribution channel.

    1. Re: Give it up already by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's because their social media and messaging platform sucks, but YouTube is a success, so they decided to build around it instead.

  8. I came here for the Luddite and "Appy App" templat by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So disappointed in the intelligent responses....Not what I was expecting.

  9. Re: I came here for the Luddite and "Appy App" tem by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Never mind. The guy above posted faster than I did. The world is right again.

  10. I made a horrible joke about this previously by AbRASiON · · Score: 2

    But maybe it's worth it...

    If I recall, it was along the lines of, the head of messaging applications should be brought out into the street and executed in front of his family or something like that.

    Either way, I'm not normally one for firing people for mistakes, but after this many? Seriously? MANY MANY , staff, need to be fired, seriously.
    SERIOUSLY.

    How can they be THIS BAD at messaging on their platforms? It's incredible.
    They STILL haven't copied iMessage, which is what most of us want. Utterly atrocious, like most of their changes in the past 5 years. Stop "fixing" things that aren't broken or canceling things which are good.

    1. Re:I made a horrible joke about this previously by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Windows Live Messenger was THE messaging application for Windows computers before Microsoft went full retard and cancelled it in favor of (a much crappier, more bloated and way less featureful) Skype.

      Voice chat, video chat, custom emotes, custom sounds, custom skins, 2-player games like checkers built into it, easy photo sharing (just drag and drop, it opens a view of the picture without having to download it), easy file sharing, Windows Media Player integration, Windows Live Mail integration, Hotmail integration, glossy interface to fit Windows Vista/7, ability to set custom fonts and colors that other people would see, group chats and to top it all off - it wasn't even slow or bloated and the protocol was simple enough that a homebrew WLM messaging app existed for even a Nintendo DS... No other messaging application could do the things WLM did at the time and to this day none of them do.

      Microsoft's decision to kill WLM really made me sad and to this day I still don't understand why they did it. Skype is garbage.

    2. Re: I made a horrible joke about this previously by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Lol half of those things there are the reasons why im glad they got rid of that fucken program preinstalled with windows. You forgot the part where it shakes the other parties screen because nothing screams "hey im a millenial give me my entitled attention now" than wlm.

    3. Re: I made a horrible joke about this previously by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But there were dozens of third party clients.
      The one I ran didn't have too many silly features, was small and graphical, written in a scripting language that used a tiny run-time and ran unmodified under Linux, Solaris, Windows 98 and Windows XP (likely many others)

      If you know how to post random shit as AC you should be able to configure software or find compatible software.