YouTube is now all set to become the new social networking site.
The world’s largest and most popular network for sharing videos has now introduced a Community tab for its channels.
The agenda of introducing this tab is to connect the creators with the audience without having to publish a new video. Apart from being a platform that allows discussions between its viewers and creators, the new Community tab also provides a notification system to its viewers to be updated with the latest updates of their subscribed channels.
The new Community tab is being tested currently on 12 YouTube channels and it is still in the beta form. With the incoming feedback, the company plans to release an improvised version to many other channels in the upcoming months.
All about What the Community Tab Actually Does
The YouTube Community tab allows the creators to share text messages, photos, GIFs and also live videos with their channel subscribers. With the addition of this new tab, the creators will not need to upload individual videos for every small announcement. It can just be communicated through the Community tab. The tab sits right in the middle alongside the other tabs for Home, Playlists, and Videos tabs. The users can also enable the push notifications for their Community posts, which allow them to stay updated with any new content that has been uploaded to the subscribed channel or about any new announcements. The viewers can now see all these posts in the “Subscriptions” feed in their YouTube mobile app.
YouTube Channels Featuring the Community Tab
The few early adopters to test the YouTube Community tab include AsapSCIENCE, John Green & Hank Green, The Game Theorists, The Key of Awesome, Karmin, Lilly Singh, The Kloons, Rosianna Halse Rojas, Peter Hollens, Vsauce3, Threadbanger and Sam Tsui.
The Vlogbrothers channel, which belongs to John Green, and his brother Hank Green, represents the famous Nerdfighter community and the creators have been testing this feature on their channel for a day. They have till now posted a Welcome text, a picture meme, and have also conducted a live video, which has garnered a lot of response.
The Community tab gives the channel creators a new way of communicating precisely with their viewers and fans and also to get their feedback directly. It also wipes out the need to make any announcements on other social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter. This tab can be used to announce live streams, upcoming videos, contests, and a lot of other things. The tab is available for the latest Android, iOS, and desktop versions of YouTube.
The video-sharing network, YouTube which is owned by Google, recently reported in a blog post about the introduction of the new Community tab and also detailed the complete list of the 12 channels which are delighted and currently rejoicing the new feature. According to a statement made in the blog post by the company’s Senior Product Manager, the release of the Community tab seems to be special for the video-networking giant, as it represents the deepest product collaboration the firm has made with the creators. It was also reported that the company first started by inviting the creators early in to develop and in partnership with the company, the tools that they needed to engage better with their viewers and fans.
This is the first step by the company and with more feedback from the creators and viewers, YouTube is looking forward to rolling out new functions and features, as well as include more creators in the upcoming months. The introduction of the new Community tab on YouTube is a very important move by Google, which has had a history of struggling to get its social networking features right, as it was seen with the failure of Google+. Google had once tried to incorporate Google+ into YouTube itself and it gave disastrous results. After this downfall last year, the Google+ and YouTube integration was rolled back.
YouTube had recently updated its Android app with a revamped design of the navigation bar, along with other minor new features. In July, the company had also brought in the new comments UI, which showed the replies, likes, dislikes, and also allowed the users to sort them out themselves.