YouTube for smartphone has recently been adding improvements and updates. After announcing that soon they’ll include playback speed, now they’ve surprised us with a new, more intriguing option: an internal chat system.
This chat, available for YouTube iOS and Android apps, will be enabled when we share a video with one or more of our friends. So, if we see a video that we like and decide to share it with some of our contacts, the app will generate a specific chat window for that video, where we can privately comment on whatever we want. It looks like this:
Once the chat is started, using it is like any other app (WhatsApp, Messenger…) but without as many additional features as competitor apps. We’ll have to settle for clicking “Like” on our friends’ comments and sharing other YouTube videos.
With that in mind, YT’s idea with this chat system isn’t to replace your favorite messaging apps, but to keep you longer on YouTube, since you won’t go to other apps to share videos with your friends (as you know, one fun video leads to another… and you can spend hours without leaving the app!).
If you don’t yet have this option on your YouTube app, don’t worry: Google is staggering implementation for all accounts.
