YouTube is helping Social Networks Become Video Conferences

As MediaPost reports, YouTube is installing chat (subscription required). I see this as the first step towards the inevitable synergy of online video and online social networks. Ultimately, we’ll have 24/7 live videoconferencing in which people communicate—either one-one-one or with many people at a time—over live online video connections.

Actually, videoconferencing is where Second Life is headed already. Second Life lets you interact with real people, real-time, while your and everyone else’s avatar moves across a screen. But avatars aren’t real people—they’re stand-ins for real-people—and so Second Life isn’t quite a video conference yet. To turn the Second Life virtual reality model into a video conference, you need to replace those avatars with streaming video of actual people.

By enabling chat, YouTube is taking a first major step towards that evolution. YouTube is placing the capability for real-time discussion within the one of the biggest social networking sites, which also one of the biggest video sites. The leap from video sites that allow chat, to sites that allow video-chat, is the next step. The final step is enabling multiple-user video chat, which will be precisely the video-networking synergy I’ve described.

TV Guide, Search, and Media Relationships

TV Guide wants to be the new leader in video search. In announcing the product, Eileen Murphy, TV Guide’s senior vice president for corporate communications, was quoted in MediaPost as touting her company’s “good relationships with many of the sites they’ll be scraping” as a point of strength to the product.

At least on one level, TV Guide’s reference to “good relations” looks like a reference to—and swipe at—Google, which does not have good relations with, say, Viacom. And the reference raises an interesting question in our synergistic age, in which there’s a thin line between acting as a search engine and hosting (or stealing) information, as YouTube has shown. (For more on that thin search/hosting line, see an article on the topic by Did-it’s Mark Simon.)

The question is: are we moving into a new age for search engines, in which algorithms and technology are just part of the picture—the rest of the picture being relationship management with the engines’ sources of information?

Bill Wise Joins Right Media: The Ontology of Synergy

The big news: Bill Wise, former CEO of Did-it, moved over to Right Media as the new President of its Remix behavioral ad network. Bill was a great CEO at Did-it, and I’m sure we’ll be hearing big news about Bill over at the other publisher side of the Web.

Just one point about Bill’s move: It exemplifies the synergy of new media of all kinds. Through its Right Media Exchange, Right brought the auctioned-based ad model to the display world. Now Right’s brought in a search alum to run behavioral ads. The clear message here is that, at least from the managerial perspective, data-driven media are data-driven media, no matter what form they happen to take.

Out of many, one.