If you’ve ever felt the urge to peek over the shoulder of a co-worker to see what video they’re watching, YouTube has a new tool that’s right up your alley. Today saw the release of YouTube Trends, which lets you get a look at what videos the rest of the country is tuned into on YouTube. You can even break down the data by user age and gender to make sure you’re keeping up with the Joneses and not missing out on all the cat videos, trailers, and lip read dubs that your peers are into right this second. After all, you wouldn’t want to look foolish, would you?
From a quick glance at Trends Map I can see that people in my demographic (30-year-old male living in New York) are rather enamored with this low budget rapping car ad at the moment, which I assure you says nothing good about people in my demographic. My friends back in Seattle, meanwhile, are passing their days watching a pitbull tenaciously swinging from a tree branch by its teeth, a fact which will surprise no one who knows my friends in Seattle.
Outside of my watching wheelhouse, older women all over the south are avidly watching the trailer for season 6 of True Blood, as is right and proper, while old ladies in the Twin Cities are watching two lynx yowl at one another on the shoulder of a country road, because old ladies in the Twin Cities are awesome.
As to what practical application this new gadget may have…I don’t really know, honestly. But for folks like me who have a yen for data on what other people are doing with their time on the Internet (read: voyeuristic tendencies) it’s a really neat toy that might even help to introduce you to some brand new ways to kill time in your workday. And really, can technology serve any higher purpose than that?
(via Mashable)
