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.
