Today, the YouTube developers team have shared a bit of news that will excite site owners: you can now officially embed a widget that lets your users upload videos:
The new YouTube Upload Widget is here! It lets your website’s visitors perform both webcam and file uploads to YouTube. Read all about it in the blog post and check out YouTube Direct Lite, a complete rewrite of the existing YouTube Direct platform developed entirely using client-side technologies: JavaScript/HTML/CSS.
Embedding the widget shown below is a snap, the team says. It was a feature that developers had apparently been asking for:
Developers have clamored for years for a way of embedding a webcam YouTube upload widget on their web pages, similar to the webcam upload tool available at youtube.com/my_webcam.
The YouTube upload widget was first discussed at Google I/O during this session:
What YouTube hopes that site owners will do is embed this widget to solicit feedback and interaction with their visitors, which could be great for contests or commenting on blog posts.
One of the sites that is using this functionality is Formspring, which is a social question and answer site. It’ll be neat to see how site owners use this feature for their community interaction.
Mind you, I personally don’t believe that people will reply to blog posts with on-the-fly videos, as we found out with Seesmic’s original product, but this could be great to get quick snippets from uber fans of your brand.
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