The video site enables you to see what your friends are sharing on Facebook

Dec 19, 2009 09:40 GMT  ·  By

Not the likeliest of partners, but common interest sometimes wins over other, more 'ideological' principles, YouTube and Facebook are getting a bit cozier with each other with the launch of a new feature that enables users to see what their friends share on the social network while on YouTube. It's the latest social move for YouTube which is trying to actually deliver the tools needed for what is at heart a rather social experience, sharing movies.

“This week we've added another launch to the "social feature" list: a feed that pushes the YouTube videos your friends are embedding on Facebook back to your YouTube homepage. This feature is in test mode right now,” Chris Testa, software engineer at YouTube, wrote.

“But if you do want your YouTube-related Facebook activity to be syndicated back to YouTube, the key is that you just stay connected to Facebook. Alternatively, you can search for your friends using the friend finding module on the homepage, and that will also connect you to Facebook,” he added.

YouTube is just testing the waters for the moment so there may be a few hiccups and it's not enabled by default. But if you really must know what your friends are embedding on the social network, you can test it out by going here and connect your Facebook account to your YouTube one. After that, as long as you're logged into Facebook, you will start to get the videos from your friends in the “Recent Activity” section.

If you just want to see what your friends are doing and not share your activity on Facebook, you can disable auto-share for the social network, or altogether, but you still have to connect your Facebook account the first time. YouTube is one of the largest websites in the world in terms of traffic, yet a big chunk of the videos streamed are viewed off site many times on various social networks so enabling a better integration between the video site and the social networks in on the priority list for YouTube.