This is a big deal, not because it is yet another example of Twitter's increasing influence (PCWorld, PCMag, Techcrunch), though it is notable that the move was made in response to requests by Google employees. What I think people are missing is that this isn't (only) about making it easier to share YouTube links on Twitter. It's already pretty easy just cut and paste the URL into your twitter client most of which have the added benefit of shortening the URL. Ultimately, I don't think Google sees a competitive threat from other video websites just because they already allow sharing to Twitter.

To understand is really going on you just need to remember that Google didn't purchase Youtube to get into the video hosting/streaming business (I mean who wants to be in that business long term anyway), they purchased it as a stronghold in the video information business: what do people watch, what do they bookmark, and now, what do they tweet.

It's not that Google couldn't previously collect info on what videos were being Tweeted but it was limited to when it happens to crawl the exploding number of Twitter pages when a YouTube URL happens to be among the recent tweets (very hard to keep up), or when a link is clicked on in a tweet which often goes through intermediaries like TinyURL and masks the original tweeter. Google has now determined that this information is now important enough that they want to collect it at the moment it was created and cutting third parties out of the info entirely. In sum, Google now recognizes Twitter as a repository of real-time information and at least with regard to video, wants to take some of that mojo back.

Now, I may be biased because we at ffwd saw this opportunity nearly a month ago and launched Twitmatic, the real-time video stream of Twitter community. If you too recognize the value that Google is going after, you don't need to wait for Google to figure it out. If you want to see all the videos being tweeted from YouTube (or one of 250 other video sites) you can do that immediately at http://www.twitmatic.com. Since then we've added support for filtering the stream on Twitter Trends, and now that we've been given proper access to the API (thanks Twitter!) we can start implementing the more advanced features users want:

• watch only the videos posted by your followers or people who follow you
• discover new people to follow based on the videos they tweet
• a twitter based comment/reply stream for videos
• track videos that correspond to your areas of interest

And please join the Twitmatic community @Twitmatic on Twitter to direct our efforts so in essence, Twitmatic will be your personalizable real-time video community and startpage.

This entry was posted by Patrick on Friday, March 27th, 2009 at 12:30 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.