14 DAY TRIAL // YouTube has announced a new feature it is adding to its service, allowing users to easily share their videos on Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader. The video sharing site already offers a variety of sharing options with buttons beneath each video but this will automate the process so that every time you upload a video your friends will be notified.
A more interesting side to the story however comes from Facebook as the new sharing feature is possible by using Facebook Connect, the social network's proprietary log-in standard. “We’re excited to share today that YouTube is the latest site to integrate with Facebook Connect. When logged into Facebook and YouTube, users can now automatically publish and share the videos they upload to YouTube directly to Facebook, ” Josh Elman wrote on the Facebook developers’ blog.
This makes YouTube by far the largest site to make use of Facebook Connect, which has seen some traction among a multitude of services, or even hardware, lately. Facebook Connect is actually a very important part of the social networking company's strategy and getting it implemented by more and more services would make its users much less likely to leave the service. The Google-Facebook relations haven't been exactly warm, to say the least, which makes the move even more surprising. Of course, this may be why YouTube hasn't actually made any mention of Facebook Connect in its rather brief announcement.
“As we learned in kindergarten, sharing is good. We want you to be able to do more of it with your videos. With a simple one-time log-in on our upload page, you can now have your YouTube account automatically update your Facebook friends, Twitter followers, and Google Reader shared items when you upload a video. If you change your mind, you can shut it off at any time. And of course, for those videos that you'd rather not share, mark them as private and they won't be sent to any other site. We hope this makes it easier to share your good times with your friends,” reads the announcement on the YouTube blog.