But ultimately, YouTube is about enjoying videos. We have seen how YouTube can be used to catch anything from mini-clips to full length movies, 3D clips, and even interactive games.
Oh, you are still here. I thought you had gone traipsing off on the above links. If YouTube is about watching videos and if it has a mass following that would be The Beatles’ envy, you can be sure that under its shade grows many YouTube services which turn watching online streaming videos into a different experience. Sometimes cool…sometimes just different. Let’s check out a few such web services.
YouTube Instant
YouTube goes real time with ‘instant’ videos. Type in a keyword (or even a single alphabet) and the app gets the most popular video according to the search term. The next five in the popularity stakes get mentioned with thumbnails on the side. You can do things like use the arrow key to quickly go to the next video.
If you are interested in instant YouTube videos check out – 3 Websites to Enjoy a YouTube Instant Experience.
iDesktop.TV
Think of this cool web app as an online media player for all YouTube videos. You can start off by getting all your YouTube search results displayed in neat rows of thumbnails. Use the slider to change the view. Bring up the video options by hovering over each thumbnail. Then you can create, save, and share YouTube playlists.
Best of all you can download the high-quality (not high definition) videos in multiple formats (but only 3 per day). The web app has paid plans and a free one (see our Directory mention).
ViewPure
The YouTube URL or a little bookmarklet is all you need for a distraction free YouTube experience. You get to watch videos without the text and ads around it. The site allows short URLs too, to share the ViewPure version to your friends (see our Directory mention).
Dipity
YouTube does not yet give you the option of searching or arranging videos by date. Dipity is a mashup which does exactly that. You can watch the videos in a chronological sequence. For instance, you can easily create a timeline of sporting events and catch the videos in the right order.
YTTM.tv
This YouTube Time Machine was set up to probably prove that there’s nothing like the good ‘ol days. Here, you have a timeline (a movable slider) on which you can lookup popular videos from years gone by. You can filter videos by switching categories on and off.
The videos are displayed at random, so you might have to do a bit of your own patient sifting (see our Directory mention).
GeoBestOfYouTube
This web service, as you might have guessed, is a way to see the most viewed YouTube videos by country. Click on the icons on the large Google Map and the balloon pops up with the video thumbnails and additional information. You can see the picks for the day, the week, the month, and all time.
Synchtube
Think of it as your own private movie room. If you have good enough bandwidth and a close bunch of pals, invite them over to watch movies (or anything else) on YouTube. With the help of Synchtube you can have public and private rooms where you can watch synchronized YouTube videos with up to 50 people. What’s cooler is that you can chat at the same time with your groupies. No registration needed (see our Directory mention).
YouTube Social
YouTube Social is quite similar to the last one, but it comes with one more option. You just have to add the word ‘social’ to the YouTube video URL (i.e. it becomes youtubesocial.com) and you get redirected to the web apps page. Now you can invite your friends to the show by sending them the URL.
You get to chat in real time while watching the video together. You can also log in through Facebook to watch videos with your Facebook circle – and that hikes up its social quotient.
Video-Alerts
Video-Alerts is a service that allows you to get an email notification once a day when new videos are uploaded to YouTube, on any topic of your choice. You can use up to ten keywords to target your preferred videos.
YouTomb
Okay, this website is about the videos you won’t get to watch on YouTube anymore. If you want to know which videos got taken down for any sort of violation, you might find a mention here. As it says in the footer, it is a research project of MIT Free Culture. The site notes the why and when. The site has cataloged about 222,471 videos that have been taken down.
There are quite a few other ways to watch the millions of YouTube videos. Then there are the alternative ways to catch the music on YouTube too which we haven’t covered here. Which is your favorite one? Or do you prefer to go back to the basic way of watching the videos on YouTube itself?
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