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YouTube will let you chat with your friends directly in its app

Google hasn’t had much success with its messaging platforms over the years. Whether it was Google Chat, Wave, or more recently Hangouts, none of the company’s platforms have stuck with consumers. But, the company is trying to breach this market once again, by bringing real-time messaging to one of its most popular products: YouTube.

According to a report from Wired, starting from today a small number of users will get to experience what Google is calling “native sharing”. In other words YouTube users on the mobile app, can chat about videos, and presumably other things, straight inside the video app. Conversations are kept in a separate tab, and users can send links to videos directly from the IM thread, no longer having to copy and paste between apps.

The company hopes that the new feature will result in more sharing of videos, more minutes watched and more time spent on YouTube’s actual pages – all of these resulting in more ad revenue for the company. In an age where Snapchat, Facebook and others are constantly vying for users’ attention, keeping them inside of your own app can be an important strategic move.

There’s no indication whether this feature will eventually be rolled out to all users. As things stand now, that’s likely to be contingent on how the few testers who are trying it out feel about the new feature. But if this proves successful we might hear and see a lot more about it, perhaps as soon as the next few weeks at Google I/O.

Source and Image: Wired

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