14 DAY TRIAL // Google announced the launch of YouTube Community, a new feature of its video hosting platform that adds support for sharing text and photos, on top of the service's native video-sharing feature.
Plans for this move leaked in the press last week. With YouTube Community, Google is resurrecting its ambition of conquering the social networking landscape, after the failed Google+ experiment.
While Google+ had to fight and get users to visit its platform on a daily basis, YouTube already has over a billion users visiting its site every day. It now remains to be seen if they'll embrace the new Community feature, or they'll leave it to rot in a corner of YouTube's menu, like past experiments.
Fighting back against Snapchat and others
For its part, Google said that this feature comes in support of content creators, the term used to describe dedicated YouTube uploaders that build their own following on the site.
There's been some pressure from other platforms lately, such as Twitch, Vine, or Snapchat, that have slowly drained talent from YouTube's creators base.
Most of these users left because they benefited from much deeper social interaction features on the other platforms that allowed them to get closer to their followings.
YouTube just got its own Facebook Wall
The new YouTube Community feature is like Facebook's Wall, but for content creators. They can share pure text posts, images, GIFs, and users subscribed to their channels will receive an update, just like in the case of a video.
The feature is a double-edged sword. Some users might not like the new spam coming from a channel, and if misused, some creators might end up with fewer subscribers than when they started.
YouTube Community is currently in Beta, with the company inviting just a few select YouTube creators to join as it tests the platform.
Below is a preview of the Community section, as seen via the YouTube mobile app.
