The technology isn’t necessarily groundbreaking, but with the wide audience YouTube has their new “Annotations” feature has some potential.
In a nutshell, YouTube Annotations are overlays that appear over your videos that can include text and links. At this time you can only link to other YouTube content. They currently come in three varieties: Speech Bubble, Note, and Spotlight. Aside from their shape, all three are relatively the same. See the example below.
Can’t play the video above? Access it directly at: http://youtube.com/watch?v=tbEei0I3kMQ
The annotations feature has potential for expanding the helpfulness of how-to videos and certainly for creating “choose your own adventure” style shows. Not truly interactive at this time since the links within annotations force you to reload a new YouTube page every time a link is clicked. Time to write some scripts to take advantage of this new feature set on the Leonard Who? show. Mental note: keep those secondary movies small so they load quick and don’t slow down the story…
June 7th, 2008 at 11:29 pm
Broken link already? Damn YouTube.
June 8th, 2008 at 1:54 am
Thanks for pointing out the broken video player Nikki. For whatever reason it isn’t allowing the embed from my site
The interactive card trick from YouTube can be accessed directly at: http://youtube.com/watch?v=tbEei0I3kMQ