YouTube Adds Annotations; Finally Some Forward Movement

One of the things you learn in business is that if you are number one, you can basically do nothing and watch all the others work hard to take you down. In the online video space, YouTube has this honor. They basically haven’t shown any innovation over the past year except for a basic player upgrade which seemed to have more to do with monetization ability than features.

Today they have released the ability to annotate videos that you upload and frankly it’s a very nice feature. Google Operating System have a good overview of how the annotations work. The annotations aren’t pretty – but YouTube has never been about pretty. What’s hot about this is that it allows me to tell a story on a video I upload.

Currently you can’t link outside of YouTube but I can see this as a way for YouTube to monetize — add the ability for a small fee to link products in videos out to the product sites. Could these annotations also be used to subtitle a video?

Here’s an example video with annotations. Pick the right ball (it’s the left one) and you move on to the next video. And a harder choice. It’s a great method for discovery and as you know I am very hot on discovery these days.

It appears the annotations only appear on the YouTube site – if that’s true, that’s silly. I have embedded the new player and they don’t show.