YouTube now offers deep links to timestamps (via URI hash)

I was very happy this morning to see that YouTube now features the option to jump to a certain time in the video directly by adding a timestamp hash to the URL. For example:

• http://youtube.com/watch?v=qie-N8idatc#t=1m54s

They also automatically create links from comments that mention timestamps. This all is something that I’ve been hacking into YouTube with the YouTube captioner and other people building Splicd.

I guess the next natural step would be to show the timestamped comments as annotations just like Viddler does it.

A spot of rain on the parade is that the geo IP redirect in YouTube breaks timestamped links as you get sent from www. to uk. (for example here in the UK as found by Simon Willison). This should be easy to fix though, please?

Tags: broken, deeplinking, timestamp, uri, youtube