YouTube just flexed its social networking muscles by adding restricted college-specific video-sharing areas. The site has long had many of the features of a social network (personal profiles, friending, et cetera), but so much of its utility is in showing videos to everybody and anybody. Now, with the release of YouTube Colleges, the company has introduced what seem to be its first exclusive areas (correct us if we’re wrong), requiring a .edu address from a particular college to access a pool of that school’s videos.
This is definitely infringing on Facebook’s turf, but Facebook has yet to add video-sharing to its college-centered social network. Colleges, with their ample supplies of bandwidth and procrastinators, are the best source of early adopters you can get, and college student presence on YouTube is certainly huge. Though the company is shy about giving out demographic information, Lee Gomes reported yesterday 70 percent of YouTube’s registered users are American, with roughly half of them under 20 years old. Via Download Squad.
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