So there’s this cool new invite-only feature on YouTube that Geoff alerted me to (via Twitter) the other day. It’s called “YouTube Real Time.” I think it has a lot of interesting potential.

Basically, you and your friends all link up, and then there’s a little toolbar at the bottom of the window that shows you what your friends are watching, how many other people are watching the video you’re watching, etc.

I am super into it conceptually. I never really had a need for friends on YouTube – I’m a user (my most-viewed non-barbarian video has about 50,000 views) but I didn’t socialize much on there.

BUT NOW I am all convincing my friends to friend me, uploading new videos, watching the bar, seeing who is watching my videos, etc. It’s pretty cool. I hope they take it out of beta and let everyone turn it on. Imagine the coolness of seeing who out of the millions of people on there at any given time were watching a video at any time. Of course, I’m a grown up and an ad guy now, so aI recognize that there may be analytics implications and downfalls and long tail validation/disproving and bad ramifications for brands that have videos uploaded that no one’s watching and blah blah blah, but… really, I just think it’s super cool.