Google, desperate to make money from YouTube, is now trying to pitch the video sharing site as a useful tool for business customers. The search giant is including YouTube as part of its Google Apps
package deal for businesses that also includes email, instant messaging, calendars, word processing and spreadsheets.
The free YouTube add-on allows employees to upload and share videos with
colleagues securely. What kind of videos would employees share? Training videos, conference highlights, internal announcements, etc. Users can search for videos, comment on them, add descriptions and
tags, embed them in Web pages or download them to their laptops or phones.
Is YouTube a helpful addition to Google Apps? Perhaps, but many wary enterprises still view video sharing and
social networking as massive time-wasters, which is why they block access to Web 2.0 sites. Even so, Rebecca Wettemann, a vice president at Nucleus Research, says that "leveraged effectively in a
business, (video) could be pretty valuable," but "Google still needs to push the business case why it makes sense."
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