YouTube Lets Users Chat With One Another On Its Mobile App

YouTube is the world’s most popular video site, but its latest development is working a little more text into the equation. It has launched a feature called “native sharing,” which functions as a chat service inside of the YouTube app.

Native sharing is intended for YouTube users who want to share their videos with friends without needing to copy/paste a link into any other messaging service, social media site, or email platform. If, for example, I want to share my love of the Hydraulic Press Channel with someone who hasn’t seen it yet, I can head over the YouTube app’s native sharing tab, start a thread with that person, and send a few videos his or her way.

As Wired theorizes, native sharing is part of YouTube’s plan to keep as much traffic within its own app. After all, if you have to leave YouTube to share a video, one place where you’re likely to go share it is on the messaging platform provided by one of YouTube’s main competitors: Facebook.

While native sharing is currently live, only a select few YouTube users currently have access to it. As those users invite their friends to chat with them, the new feature will become available to a larger portion of the video site’s audience. If you want to check native sharing out, make sure you download the latest version of the YouTube app, which is available for iOS and Android devices.