14 DAY TRIAL // Social gaming has done wonders for Facebook and the market is one of the fastest growing and the most profitable in the web industry. But can Google do the same on YouTube? It remains to be seen, but a patent application that just surfaced indicates that it's at least thinking of it. Filed earlier this year but published this month, the application focuses on a new layer of interactivity within the videos which seem to be geared towards creating games based on those videos.
"Some examples of annotations are graphical text box annotations, which display text at certain locations and certain times of the video, and pause annotations, which halt playback of the video at a specified time within the video," the application, discovered by Bnet, reads.
Annotations have been available for YouTube videos for a while, but they've been static until now, just plain text boxes with no interactive component. Not even basic links are enabled in them. This may change though, with 'invisible' annotations which control playback, like the pause one, and with others that link to a certain portion of the video or other videos depending on the user's actions.
"Some annotations, e.g. a graphical annotation (such as a text box annotation) comprising a link to a particular portion of a target video, are associated with a time of the target video, which can be either the video with which the annotation is associated, or a separate video," the patent application's abstract also reads.
These interactive annotations could have several applications, but YouTube is clearly focusing on the gaming aspect as revealed in the last part of the text. "Such annotations can be used to construct interactive games using videos, such as a game in which clicking on different portions of a video leads to different outcomes."
The application was filed in February, 2009, and so far YouTube hasn't done anything like this, though it might in the future. And it certainly makes sense, this won't bring Farmville to YouTube, but it would enable creative users to make some very interesting things using just videos and the tools the site will provide. YouTube suggests jumping to different parts of a video depending on the user's interactions to create a form of interactive storytelling, but it can go beyond this, for example, by creating a quiz game where the users get to advance if they get the answers right.