Is YouTube looking to leverage your social graph to encourage sharing to expand their usage?

It would seem that way.

YouTube has been making a ton of changes over the last couple months, from minuscule design changes to drastic ones, such as changing their default viewing page from most viewed to the ambiguous ‘most popular’.

However, in the last two months Google has been tying YouTube users to their Gmail accounts more and more. I believe that the next logical step will be to enable YouTube users to tap into Gmail contacts without ever having to leave the site – no more cut and paste url’s, users pull up their contact list without ever leaving YouTube.

It’s likely the changes Google has been making are a symptom of the social tie-ins that are to come. Here’s a quick recap of the YouTube/Gmail integrations that have occurred so far:

* January 2009, YouTube made changes so that “If you receive (or send) a link to a video in a chat [gchat] message, you’ll see a preview of the video right in your chat window.”

* Early March 2009, a new feature was added to Gmail so that videos that are emailed will show up inside your messages.

* Late March 2009, YouTube and Gmail made it easier to log in with your Google credentials, “If you have your YouTube account associated with your Google account, you no longer have to go to a separate page to log in to YouTube with your Google account information. It’s all in one place at sign-in.”

Google has also added the ability for users to send an invite to YouTube with a  personalized note to a username or email address.

Considering people love to share YouTube videos, it makes sense to more closely tie contact lists to the site. YouTube has already hinted as much – recently stating, “The process of connecting with your friends on YouTube will see some bigger improvements soon.”

The ‘share’ template YouTube currently uses (pictured below) is perfectly set up to call up user’s Gmail contacts, much in the same way Google Docs already does. For those who are not familiar with Google Docs, it’s a web service that lets users create word and excel files in the cloud and easily share them via email and with pre-existing Gmail contacts.

YouTube Google Docs

With expensive premium content deals on the way and Google’s need to get a return on its multi billion-dollar investment, monetizing YouTube has become a top priority.

An integrated Gmail/YouTube will allow more relevant advertising, benefiting Google and marketers who are looking to more effectively target their audience by encouraging sharing among user’s social graph.

Yesterday afternoon Facebook announced thay they are opening up Facebook Status, Links, and Video to the Facebook Platform. Previously Facebook made a really hard distinction between app data and user data. Only users could directly import items into their notes, links, etc. These new changes are allowing apps to automatically make updates if a user opts in. This is a shift from their pattern over the last year and a half of continually rolling out rules and restrictions, which have left developers frustrated.

Here’s a quick recap of the major restrictions Facebook has imposed in the past:

August 2007 – Facebook began to impose restrictions, and made apps more difficult to install. Facebook changed metrics on leader boards to focus on engagement, as opposed to installs.

January 2008 – Facebook changed news feed rules for apps so that news feeds stories around apps became limited, and no longer visible to users who do not have the app.

February 2008 – Facebook created a sliding scale for app invites. Invites were no longer limited to 20 invitations per user per day, but determined by an algorithm, which took in to account the following factors:
- Historical invitation acceptance rate
- Whether your application overrides the user’s choice to invite no friends, but instead forces users to invite friends
- Additional factors that “reflect the affinity users show for the application as a whole”

April 2008 – Facebook allows users to stop receiving app invites through filter options.

July 2008 – Facebook launched their redesign which moved moved apps off the front page and into newly launched tabs. They also made app installs irrelevant/non-existent, and allowed users to bookmark apps instead.

November 2008 – Facebook launched their app approval system and Great App Program. Apps approved as part of Application Verification Program were given greater visibility, but developers had to pay $375 and abide by ‘guiding principles’ to gain entry. Facebook announced that some Apps (ie maybe 10-15 each year) would be deemed ‘Great Apps’ and be given even more exposure.

Ultimately, these constant changes and restrictions to the platform left developers frustrated. The changes required developers to rework their apps, and in most cases caused their app traffic, and in turn their businesses, to dwindle. In a recent interview by Infinite Pixel Studios one frustrated app developer stated that, “Facebook is constantly doing code changes often unnecessary which break features.” Another developer vented in an interview with Reuters, stating that, “rather than enforcing rules against those who are developing applications in bad faith, Facebook has changed the rules for everyone.”

A quick glance at the daily usage of RockYou, one of the original app developer networks, shows a massive decline in traffic as a result of Facebook’s continued restrictions since their peak over a year ago.