Six Degrees of YouTube

by Michael Dinowitz

Want to get in on the next great party game? Want to know what YouTube's been hiding on their site? Read on!

If you call up a video on YouTube, you see a list of related content on the side of the page. Nice, but so last decade. Let's move to 2008. If you take that video and enlarge it to the full screen you get a hidden option - 'related bubbles'.

Visualize a bubble. This bubble will have a picture in it of the video you were watching. It'll also have a color around it (this will be important later). Circling around this bubble are a number of other bubbles containing pictures of videos related to the one you just watched.

This is not hidden in the sense that Google doesn't want you to know about it but hidden in the sense that it's just not obvious.

To access this feature, you have to jump through a few hoops. Starting in full screen, look towards the lower left hand corner for an icon that looks like three bubbles stacked in a pyramid. Clicking on this will launch a Flash app that shows you your video bubble, related bubbles and allows you to mouse over any bubble on the screen. Mousing over a bubble may cause it to 'spawn' off bubbles with videos related to it rather than to the video you just watched. The more you mouse over, the larger the spread of related bubbles and the further you can get from your original video.

Clicking on any of these bubbles will show the video that it represents. The video is displayed within the 'bubble zone' and has limited controls in comparison to the normal YouTube video player. You do have the option to enlarge it and gain access to the standard controls or you can close the video. If you enlarge the video you will need to click on the bubble icon again to go back.

After viewing a video selection from the bubble zone, you'll see a line connecting your previously watched videos to this new one. You can go on and on from one video to the next with a visual trail of where you came from. If you look in the upper left hand corner you'll also see a number of colored circles. Mousing over each will show you a bubble in your trail. The only limit is that the trail only links to the last 10 video bubbles and if a new video is clicked on, it pushes the earliest one off the list.

Now that you know how to get access to this feature, let's make it into a game. The obvious one is to select a video and click from one to the next to see where you go or until you get to a specific one. I played the game and after six clicks moved from "United 300" to "the Porn Song". An alternative is to get a group of people around a large screen and follow the trail of consensus. One person suggests a bubble and, after watching the video, you move to another.

I was watching this happen at the Google booth right next to me at Flex360, and the crowd followed a trail that ended with a pole-vaulter hitting himself with his pole in a sensitive area. And no one could turn away. That's a success at any party. :)

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