YouTube Pulls Its ‘Realtime Sharing’ Feature

Less than a year after introducing a feature that let YouTube visitors see in “real-time” which videos their friends were watching and what they were saying about them, the site has pulled it. When we wrote about the launch last April, YouTube said the goal was to give users “another way to share and find videos on the site” — but it never gained much traction (and in fact was only ever available via an invite).

Since launching it, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) has also gone ahead and introduced other — perhaps more straightforward — features designed to get users to watch more clips, including a more sophisticated recommendation system.

The company’s statement: “We routinely test early products in TestTube to give the YouTube community a chance to try them out before retiring them, or rolling them out more broadly. Some social features, like Auto-Share, gain a lot of interest and adoption within the YouTube community while others do not.”

TechCrunch first reported earlier today that the feature had been shut down.

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