Last week YouTube began sending out invitations to users for a new technology called RealTime. (TechCrunch story here.) Currently in early beta, RealTime allows users to see what videos their friends are watching and to send invitations to come watch the video they’re watching. It’s clear that one of YouTube’s goals is to increase the collaboration occurring on the site itself, as much of the discussion today about videos from YouTube occurs outside of the site, on IM, blogs, Twitter, Facebook and even offline at the water cooler.
We find that brands using ShopTogether today are seeing longer sessions, less abandonment and higher sales because they’re bringing the social nature of what happens in the offline world back to their sites. While social networks like Facebook and Twitter have done this for general social networking, technologies like ShopTogether and now YouTube’s RealTime are doing this for more specific purposes and replicating a “real-world” environment in their online communities.
As significant sites like YouTube begin incorporating social collaboration technologies, users will come to expect these features on other sites they visit, and the brands that begin adopting this technology early will be seen as leaders in their respective categories.