YouTube announced earlier today that, at just five-years-old (can you believe it?), the online video host now exceeds over two billion views a day. According to the Google-owned site, “that’s nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major U.S. television networks combined.”
What it didn’t announce, however, was the hashtag-like system it appears to have quietly released for its commenting system, which turns certain Internet acronyms into colorful, searchable boxes of their own.
So, to recap on that first part, YouTube is five-years-old, handling over two billion views a day and launching the YouTube Five Year channel, where users can submit videos that describe how YouTube has changed their lives.
More interestingly perhaps, YouTube has added some colorful hashtags to its commenting system. Now, typing in #LOL, #FTW, #FAIL and #OMG (from what we’ve tried and seen) creates little orange boxes containing the text, each of which you can click on to search for similarly tagged videos.
Maybe instead of reading comments back aloud to squelch the number of inane threads, YouTube thought it would silence some commenters (and therefor complainers over the inanity of YouTube comments) by giving people a quick and colorful way to express themselves.
More likely, we’re expecting the sort of functionality we’ve seen on other video sites, whereby we can click on an OMG button to search for other OMG videos for hours of unending OMG fun. For all we’re aware, there’s not much more to categorizing the world, after all, than OMG, FTW, LOL and FAIL, right?
Oh, and if you’re still feeling all warm and gushy over the part where we celebrate YouTube for reaching arbitrary round-numbered statistics, here’s a video they put together for you to rejoice with it.
[Thanks Rahul Mathur.]
