Introducing Collaborative Annotations

When we launched annotations last June, we had a hunch you'd find creative ways to use them and, sure enough, you put them vigorously to work, pushing the limits of information sharing, interactive games and storytelling.



Today, we are excited to bring a new twist to annotations: the ability to collaborate on them with other YouTube users. Now you can invite anyone you like to create speech bubbles, notes and spotlights on your videos.



Enabling Collaborative Annotations is easy. First, go to your annotations editor (which you can find in My Videos or by going directly to your video's watch page) and retrieve the special annotations link. Then send it out to your friends. Once they click on the link, they will be allowed to add annotations to your video. If you don't like what they write you can always delete their annotations, and you can also disable access to the annotations URL so that no more can be added. Naturally, you can edit or delete anything you write on someone else's video.



So please give it a whirl -- you can start by participating in the first collaborative sitcom, "Kevin N' George Must Die," created by students of the Nissan acting studio -- and let us know what you think. We can't wait to see how you take online collaboration to a whole new level.



Best,

Ryan Junee

Product Manager

The YouTube Team




P.S. Even though we think annotations are really cool and give you yet another reason to start interacting even more deeply with videos on the site, we realize some of you are "old school" and prefer to see just the video and nothing more. For this reason we've added a setting that lets you permanently disable annotations. Check out this Help Center article for more information.