YouTube warp visualization

Posted By: Marshall

Last night, while surfing Reddit, I found this nifty little trick for YouTube. By replacing the word “watch” in the URL with “warp.swf,” you get a graphical representation of the video you’re watching and its connection to related videos.

Here’s an example of the altered URL: http://www.youtube.com/warp.swf?v=Xtssc6MAxUU

Apparently this has been around for a while in Google’s Testube, but I hadn’t heard about it until now. I can see why it’s not released publicly yet. All the video is low quality and stretched, but the interface is a lot of fun. Within minutes of messing around with it, I went from Advent Creative’s videos to a patch of funny German TV commercials.

While this is just a fun trick right now, it may one day be the way we surf the Internet. I wrote a blog post a while back about a group of programmers that were working on some online collaborative software that would be more of a workspace than an actual page. This YouTube Warp is in the same vein. I personally prefer surfing without the restraint of pages and backward and forward buttons. Let’s hope this trend continues.