YouTube Enables Deep Linking Within Videos

Jason Kincaid, TechCrunch: YouTube Enables Deep Linking Within Videos 102508:

It’s not a big new feature but it’s certainly one that will come in handy: YouTube will now allow you to send users to a specific point in a video by appending a short tag to the end of a video’s URL. It’s pretty surprising that this functionality wasn’t available earlier, as Google Video introduced the same feature over two years ago. YouTube users have been forced to rely on third party services like Splicd to do the same thing.

To specify a point, append a tag to the end of your video link with the following syntax: “#t=1m45s” you can change the numbers before the ‘m’ and ’s’ to edit the minutes and seconds, respectively.

Here’s an example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bibCui3lFM#t=1m45s

As another nice touch, YouTube will also automatically detect when someone mentions a time in a video comment and add a hyperlink to that point in the video.

The feature just went live and there isn’t any easy way to do this though the YouTube UI without manually adding the tag YouTube hasn’t mentioned it on its official blog yet, either.

The YouTube team also has a great sense of humor. As was covered earlier this month,YouTube commentors are now presented with a button asking if they’d like to hear their comments read aloud before they are posted, in the hopes of preventing instances of accidental stupidity the feature is a response to this now-famous comic.