Most of my experiences with YouTube involved being sent a link, clicking on it, and viewing the movie. Otherwise, I’d played around just a bit looking at most viewed videos in different categories.
I was surprised the other day to realize there is a whole other level of experience in YouTube which is not really exposed to you until you browse around the community groups and profiles in depth: through the profiles, through the comments on videos, through the videos themselves, people are engaged in conversation! Rich communities are emerging around particular topics, often through asynchronous video clips that refer and build on each other. Here’s an example, a YouTube group about: mental health . This woman is responding to another video post, and she has a lot of comments responding to her.
Communities built around asynchronous video based communication! Yah.
Well, all I have to say is something tells me there is going to a whole flurry of research papers on this topic next year at CHI. Any graduate students looking for a new and exciting topic in social computing?
I also think it’s interesting that the YouTube has this feature and it’s not well-known. We started a project here at HP Labs called Conversa which addresses this interesting social tech idea of using video for asynchronous conversations. There’s something really rich and different about video threads versus plain text.
I have a fairly new blog at HP.com (www.hp.com/blogs/vorbau) and I’ll post a video of the project there soon. I need to make sure we have the legal green light to publicize it.
Anyway, thanks for the link to the Mental Health conversation. It’s a good example of this.
-Alex