YouTube has just enabled a new feature that allows users to directly share their recently uploaded videos to Facebook, Twitter, and Google Reader. This means you’ll be able to syndicate your newly uploaded content directly into your friends’ feeds. You can link your accounts on YouTube’s ‘Upload’ page.
This isn’t exactly a novel feature — many web services have already tied into Facebook, Twitter, and to a lesser extent, Google Reader. But it is notable given the rivalry between Facebook and Google, which which have previously sparred over “openness” and their abilities to tap into the social graph.
The new functionality is limited to new video uploads for now, but I won’t be surprised if YouTube builds on it by allowing users to immediately share all videos that they add to ‘favorites’. Of course, there is already a sharing button located beneath each YouTube video that lets you post videos you like to a variety of services, but this would help automate the process. YouTube is clearly looking to expand its sharing functionality (see YouTube Real-Time, which is currently in private beta testing), and increased sharing to these other services seems like a logical extension.
This is also going to have a major impact on existing video sharing services on Twitter, like TwitVid. These smaller Twitter-specific services do have one advantage over YouTube for the time being, though: unlike TwitPic, YouTube doesn’t allow you to enter a message to share alongside your video link, which means you won’t be able to share any context with it.
It’s also worth noting that I uploaded a video to YouTube to test out the new feature, and while it finished processing over 10 minutes ago, it has yet to get auto-Tweeted.
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