• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 10, 2009

YouTube will launch a feature that will make it easier to share videos with friends and family. The "You may know these people" suggestion box will appear on the home page within the next few weeks. It will provide the person visiting the site with a list of people across the YouTube channels they might know. The feature aims to make it easier to connect and subscribe to friends' videos.

For the most part, the feature announced in a blog post Wednesday did not get rave reviews from YouTubers reading the news. Although some can't wait to have the new feature, others were quick to broadcast disapproval.

While there's no shortage of feedback, the YouTube team takes into consideration every comment that sometimes even alters the product road map. Running a variety of tests -- usability, key metrics, quantitative and qualitative -- as products are developed and deployed helps YouTube determine the success or the failure of features. Aside from blog posts and creative videos in YouTube, the team looks for posts on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites.

Posts across the Web are analyzed in aggregate to study how people respond. "Often, we find people have questions related to new products or features we have not yet been able to answer for one reason or another," says Hunter Walk, director of product at YouTube. "Sometimes we'll go into the user forum and post additional data that answers questions. Then, as we release a product, we monitor how use and sentiment change over time to alter the features accordingly."

Oliver Needham thinks the "You may know these people" feature reflects Google's push to make YouTube more like Facebook. With 47 videos on his YouTube page since joining in August 2006, he isn't a newcomer -- or shy about speaking up when he's passionate about a topic.

"The feature won't really improve it much," Needham says. "Most of my friends are on YouTube and I already interact with them. It's just another way of them trying to advance on what many already do, such as allow people to add their email contacts from GMail, MSN or Hotmail."

U.K.-based Needham really likes YouTube's ability to automatically post videos as links, but relies on Facebook and Twitter more often to stay connected with friends. He likes Twitter for its 140-character limit, which doesn't sound like a lot, but can actually contain a great deal of information --including short URLs to important information, he says. He likes Facebook because of the sheer number of friends also on the site.

Melsue1989 believes the "You may know these people" feature is a "horrible idea" because it's typically awkward and embarrassing when friends do find the videos. "Why do we need what MySpace and Facebook have?" she writes in a comment on the blog. "If I wanted people to see my videos, I would send it to them," she adds. Facebook has a box that typically appears in the right rail of a person's home page that suggests fan pages or organizations friends have joined or like.

YouTube will rely on accounts linked to a Gmail to help identify friends who have a YouTube channel. There are other ways too, but people will only see channels whose owners remain open to others through their email address.

That's something that LoganPhyve is a little worried about. In a post on the YouTube blog, LoganPhyve asks if there is a way to remove "my Gmail association with my YouTube account since I had the YouTube account before they had Google-based logins. He doesn't want his more than 800 business contacts in Gmail to find the "videos of stupid crap."

Sometimes people react to features they don't fully understand or are not initially excited about, but warm up to as the product hits the market, Walk says. No one's perfect. Many times Google's or YouTube's messaging isn't perfect, which can cause confusion, too.