Back on Wednesday of this week, with regards to YouTube videos.
Have you ever wanted to skip to a specific point in a video-or better yet, share that specific point in the video with others-but decided against it because it would be too much trouble to skip to that point, hope that you find that point in your first few 'fast forward' attempts, or you don't want to annoy others by making them search for that point ("Hey! Check out the video at 1:30-skip the rest!")?
Well, you can now add an extra set of characters to the end of your link pinpointing the exact time in the video you want people to see. It's quite cool.
The neat thing I noticed is that the video begins loading from this point as well, so you don't have to wait for the first part of the video to load before your point in time begins playing.
So...if you wanted to send people to this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovJT7sDo0JQ
But want to skip over all of the 32 seconds of introductions, you can just add this string to the end of the URL: #t=00m32s
(Now, close the original browser window the first)
Your URL now looks like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovJT7sDo0JQ#t=00m32s
No more introductions! How cool is that?
Thanks for the trick, Matt Cutts!