Myspace's latest feature to let users use their webcams to record videos is something that Facebook and Youtube members have long had the pleasure of doing. Youtube was the first service to introduce this feature back in December of 2006. Facebook followed suit and introduced the feature in May of 2007.

Unfortunately, Myspace hasn't brought anything new to the table. Videos have a recording limit of up to 10 minutes, which is the same as Youtube. On the other hand, Facebook allows its users to extend their recording time up to 20 minutes. All of these services offer privacy settings for your videos. Youtube is the only one that forces you to make your video private after publishing it publicly first. We found the video quality from Myspace to be sub-par at best. We've experienced better recording and play-back quality from video services like Seesmic and 12seconds.tv. We guess something's better than nothing, right?

What To Expect

You can expect to see more videos and hear more noise on Myspace profiles. We just hope that users don't take this too far and record the most outrageous things with their webcams. Musicians can definitely take things to the next level with the new webcam recording feature. Fans of musicians could start seeing recordings of mini-studio sessions from bands or get a sneak peek on a new song from an artist. Musicians could even use the feature to send quick shoutouts to fans or address any questions immediately. All of this can be done without the hassle of recording from a separate software, converting the video, and waiting for it to finish uploading to Myspace. Now Myspace will do all the dirty work for you.

In April we reported that YouTube's dominance in online video was bigger than Google's dominance in search (67%). The new Hitwise numbers raise a number of questions for us.

Hitwise reports that overall video viewership in May of this year fell 9% compared to May of last year, but times on site grew 6%. That's strange. We've asked whether the rapidly growing Hulu is included in this batch of numbers and will update this post when we get a reply. (Update: Hitwise says that Hulu is now the 13th most watched video site and is seeing consistent growth each month.) Could it be that last year saw a large number of people checking out online video for the first time, only a certain percentage of them found that they liked it but those people are now watching more than before? If readers have any theories why the video market is declining in absolute number of viewers, we'd love to hear them.

YouTube's huge dominance over a market that includes a wide variety of different video sites, each with different communities and feature sets, probably does not bode very well for innovation in the sector. We'd love to see more people checking out innovative services like Metacafe, Blip.tv and others. We wrote about the top video content producers in the world yesterday, many of which are bigger in places other than YouTube. Smaller up and comers outside of YouTube deserve some attention, too.