Imagine being able to join your friends online and watch whatever they are watching in real-time. Millions of hours are spent watching sites like YouTube, so the likelihood that one or more of your friends via social networking is watching something you might be interested in at that moment is quite high.
Using Skype-like VOIP and “chat”, you could seamlessly join in with what your friend is experiencing. It’s like walking into a room with all your friends and millions of TVs, seeing what’s on and hanging out.
Others may see it differently, but i imagine that a lot of time spent watching streaming movies is fairly idle for the viewers in the same way TV also became a popular way to pass the time (as well as to entertain and inform). So i don’t think the ability for others to join your viewing experience would normally be considered an intrusion – particularly if you can have the usual social-networking availability statuses.
Most of us when sat in a work/laptop group will happily “chat” and surf without needing to look at each other. Sure eye-contact and gestures can add to more fluid group communication but the widespread use of “chat” services have proved that it is effective. This new service advances that communication into actual chat and what we call “chat” will become “type”.
Chats would work (for example) through open, closed or private groups on participating video/media sites. As I’m most often open to chat when I first go online to check links, Facebook, email etc etc, I would likely go online with an open(minded) status. Others could then see the media content of my application/web-browser. I could then join others with an open status who are watching something interesting or who i would like to talk to and i could be joined by others who have seen me come online and/or like what I’m watching or just want to talk. As long as my status is open i can be joined by any number of people.
We could talk about whichever media that we are watching or we could discuss whether the cheese on the moon really is Wensleydale. The media sharing acts as a conversation starter – proven effective with friends and strangers alike – or we could say nothing and just watch, or having watched a bit and not wanting to interrupt i could leave and go watch it from the beginning (providing i have access to the source) or i could just leave. In fact I could do whatever i wanted to; same as most social networking sites.
However, if i end up in conversation with someone or a group and want to have a word just between ourselves or set up a group which is invitation only. I set my status to closed by linking solely to another person. I can be seen to be online but cannot be contacted without a request alert which requires positive acceptance first. Accepting new invitations links the individual to the private group but all other members can mute and un-mute on demand from a list of chat participants.
Specifically, the list would initially only show the contact who brought you into the group, your friends in the group, those who have unmuted you and those who joined after you. Those who were already in the group cannot be seen without permission allowing a hierarchical structure based on degrees of separation from the group’s originators.
There’s no need to do more than mute/un-mute as we’d all be watching the same thing anyway. And for the extrovert in each of us there’s an automatic un-mute toggle switch.
Should i choose not to go online with an open status, I could go with a closed status and just track down someone who i want to talk to. Friends of mine would still see i was online and request to contact me - but only friends.
Finally, I could use the private status setting. This would hide me from other users unless i reach out and contact another. Only they could see me and if they accept my status and participation would not be discoverable unless mentioned in conversation with someone else – but you can’t fault the system if that happens to you.
Naturally the service would be free, and considering you may need the capabilities and capacity to run Skype and YouTube simultaneously (you may end up needing to buy both) the funding has to come from somewhere.
So you could take a commission of the online advertising viewed through it – 0.1% even but if you had it running as an always on you portal you could get a slice of a lot of advertising online – Google, Yahoo, the works. That should be a fair amount of money. A non-affiliated-ad blocker could be built in to encourage ad-vendors to sign-up to the commission plan. If the ad is blocked the spaces will read “Keep open(mind) free! Click here to show that you support advertising on free services.” These clicks could be tracked and used to provide evidence of positive consumer attention to prospective affiliates.
In return, affiliated sites could require free account creation/linking to Facebook etc for you to view their media. This gives them more channels to communicate and sell their advertising.