YouTube Supercharges Related Videos in Fullscreen
December 13, 2007 by Mike Abundo
Filed under Computers
So I open a YouTube video in fullscreen, and I see this new button in the lower left corner. It looks like the share icon turned on its side.
I hit the button, and links to related videos appear — not as pages of links, but as mouseover bubbles.
Hover over a bubble for a while, and you get more bubbles related to that bubble. Border colors shift to indicate video relationships. This continues ad infinitum until you have scrollable screenfuls of bubbles. Hovering over the green dot in the corner re-centers on the original video.
YouTube’s recommendation engine is what makes discovering new videos so horribly addictive. Clearly, these guys know their strengths. While it all looks fruitily “Web 2.0″-ish — and thus might initially confuse people — this bubble interface only makes their recommendation engine even easier to jump across. I’m going to get even less sleep now. Nice work, YouTube.
This function does have one huge flaw: it purges all buffering when triggered. Don’t hit that button in the middle of a long video.
*the colors in the corner act like bookmarks, and the relationships also get mapped through lines that connect the bubbles – effecting a type of Graph for your viewing patterns.
web2.0 for sure, but what specific technologies/languages? whatever has gone into producing this on the back end, the result is a much more intuitive interface. it’s visually slick, highly responsive, and feels like it might be slightly more addictive than crack.
anyone wondering about the next iteration/more widespread adoption of this kind of navigation?
Slightly more addictive than crack, eh? No wonder it looks so trippy. ;P
I can’t seem to access the feature in Youtube anymore. Where has this bubble interface gone?