As soon as Youtube updated the look of their embedded player for all ( it was optional before ), it has added an amazing feature 
which screams “Youtube is the king of online video!�. This might seem like a big statement to some who like Veoh, Hulu, Dailymotion and other websites more. But the fact that you can now add speech bubbles, spotlights and notes to any video you upload to Youtube keeps it above the rest.
Youtube Annotations is the newest and most innovative feature so far that I’ve seen in online video sharing websites as it brings a whole new dimension of interactivity to your videos. As a matter of fact, it does for online videos, what subtitles have done for DVDs. The process of adding annotations to your videos isn’t difficult either. It involves you uploading the video of your choice, or selecting one of your already uploaded videos. On the video page, you’ll see a new portion under the embed code area.
Click the Add Annotations button, and you’ll be taken to the Annotations editor, which is built like a movie editor software would be, only it’s much simpler and easier to use. Instead of a separate timeline as with desktop applications, it allows you to work on the seek bar of your Youtube video and use that as a timeline. You can click either of the 3 options ( Add Speech Bubble, Add Note, Add Spotlight ). All these options are very useful as with speech bubbles, you can make comic style bubbles which can make it very interesting depending on the video. With notes, you can just add a note on any portion of the video ( it can also be 
used as subtitles, only problem being that the background isn’t transparent). And spotlight can highlight an area on the video, but wont show any text unless you hover on that portion. You can even use links ( although the links are limited to Youtube’s only for now) in your text.
You can just click on any option, place it on the video according to your liking, and set the time you want. And that’s it. You can then save it for quick editing later or just publish it for the world to view. I see this feature as very useful in making tutorials, silent movies, product descriptions, labeling videos or tagging people in them as well as funny videos.
This feature is sure going to be a hit amongst the users. Annotations look even better in full screen mode. But annotations are still in beta, so they still have some thing to implement such as
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Viewing of annotations in embedded videos.
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Text in other languages then English in annotations.
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You can’t put up links in annotations other then related YouTube videos, channels, or search results from within a video.
Another thing that this feature shows as that any other blog posts failed to notice such as Mashable, Google Operating System, Google Blogoscoped and Webware to name a few is that this is one of the striking new features that show how web applications can deliver as much features or even more then desktop applications now. As far as I know, I’ve never seen this feature in the long time I’ve been using Windows Movie Maker, and now I wonder how such an integral feature has been missing from a desktop movie editing application. This is really an answer for the advocates of desktop applications who keep questioning the reliability and power of desktop applications. Any desktop application would have advertised this as their main feature and charged for it, but with web applications and specially with the hindsight of Google, we get this brilliant new feature for free. More power to the web!
Update: It turns out that Deviant Art already had this feature through the (aggressive) comments of Neowin Community Members. Although I couldn’t find the video feature on the main page, I’ll do an updated comparison on both these services shortly.
Hulu and YouTube have nothing to do with each other. Why even make the comparison. They both host SOME sort of video, that’s it.
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Hulu is mentioned as it hosts videos too like Youtube, nothing else is considered in that regard. Some users like Hulu more than Youtube, so that statement mentions this fact.
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I hope they add the ability to link to other websites in video annotations. That can be very useful when posting video tutorials.
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Great article. And this is a great example of YouTube Annotations… It’s hysterical! Check it out!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqujFiwL5cs
-Paul
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I like the annotations portion. However, I would like to have the added feature of being able to save a copy of the annotated video on my own computer. I can go through the trouble of adding the annotations, but am only able to view them on YouTube. I’ve tried to use vDownloader but it doesn’t save the annotations along with the video.
Any ideas?
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Please learn the difference between then and than. Please.
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Imran Hussain Reply:
August 11th, 2008 at 9:43 pm
lol you’re too late to point this out, grammar police!
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