YouTube first introduced annotations last June, but starting today, Google’s popular video sharing site is making it even easier to add text comments into your own videos. Whereas before you had to go into a relatively complicated annotations editor to add your comments, you can now just click on a spot in the video during playback and the annotations editor will open automatically. Google has also made it significantly easier to add links to other content on YouTube into your annotations.
Now, when you watch your own videos on YouTube, a crosshair appears on the screen and you can start adding annotations by simply clicking anywhere on the video without having to go into the annotations editor.
The new linking options inside the comments now allow you to point to another video, channel page, playlist, group, or search query. You will not be able to link to content outside of YouTube, however. The YouTube team also highlights the possibility of linking to a video response page to gather feedback from your audience.
Is This a Good Thing?
The question, of course, is if this is actually a good thing. Too often, users already overuse the annotations to advertise some of their other videos or to remind us that the video is also available in HD (a note that also pops up when you are already watching the video in HD, by the way). Even Google seems to be aware of this, as they provide a help page with instructions for how to turn these annotations off for embedded videos.
Omnisio
We can only assume that this is the first part of the integration of Omnisio‘s technology into the core YouTube service. Google acquired Omnisio last July, though it is important to note that the service did a lot more than just video annotations.
