YouTube Upgrade Includes Sharing Videos with Twitter

YouTube users can now share videos on Twitter feeds, along with choices for Facebook, MySpace, Digg and Hi5. Earlier, YouTube owner Google integrated Twitter with Google Friend Connect, and it has introduced new features for Google Reader. YouTube also enhanced support for mobile browsers, and YouTube EDU provides education content.

The ability to share Twitter feeds is among the latest batch of changes unveiled this week at YouTube, which Alexa, a Web traffic analyzer, ranks as the world's third most popular Web property after Yahoo and Google.

Given that so many people are on Twitter these days, YouTube said it has added Twitter to the share options so users can easily send a video into their Twitter streams. Other YouTube video-sharing options include Facebook, MySpace, Digg and Hi5.

When users click to share with Twitter, a pop-up window opens that routes users to their twitter accounts and formulates a Tweet telling recipients to "check out this video," with the title and URL added to the message.

"This was a big internal request, but we know many of you asked for it, too," YouTube's development team said. "We don't currently shorten the video URL automatically, but hope to get to it down the road."

By Mark Long
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