The Youtube development team just announced an exciting news for anyone looking to enhance its video collaboration productivity: the introduction of collaborative annotations.
First, go to your annotations editor (which you can find in My Videos or by going directly to your video’s watch page) and retrieve the special annotations link. Then send it out to your friends. Once they click on the link, they will be allowed to add annotations to your video. If you don’t like what they write you can always delete their annotations, and you can also disable access to the annotations URL so that no more can be added. Naturally, you can edit or delete anything you write on someone else’s video.
(yea, I’m in France right now)
The Youtube team invites people to experience the feature through the first collaboative sitcom ever, “Kevin N’ George Must Die” – Episode A: Can You Save Them?“. Quite honestly, there are annotated links all over the place, and I didn’t quite get what was the point of it all. It sounds fun and awfully addictive for any power Youtuber.
I find the collaborative annotations to be much more useful as a video project management tool. Imagine working on a Web development project for example, and you need to share your work with your clients or other parties implied in the development. Do a quick screencast of your work, post it on Youtube, and share the annotation link with the interested parties. They can add comments, or even record there own work on Youtube and link to it from the original video.
To my opinions, in this frame of thought, the possibilities are endless. What Youtube should offer is a way to keep track of each annotation and video the same way you can keep track of any user’s action on a wiki.
Does that sound plausible? If so, how would you use it?