Google has a reputation for launching and shutting down messaging services, and soon another one of its messaging products is going away.
YouTube direct messaging will be shut down on September 18. "We’re constantly reevaluating our priorities and have decided to discontinue YouTube’s native direct messaging feature while we focus on improving public conversations," YouTube explained.
You'll still be able to share YouTube videos by selecting "Share" on a video's page and then tapping the social network icon that you want to share a video on.
If you used YouTube's messaging and would like to save a copy of your messages, you can use Google's Takeout tool to do so. Just go here, go to the YouTube section, select "All data included" to choose which data you want to keep, and then deselect all data except "Chats".
YouTube messaging launched a couple of years ago to help users share videos while on YouTube. It doesn't seem to have caught on with consumers, though, and so now YouTube is killing the feature off and focusing on improving its comments, posts, and stories. Did you ever use YouTube's direct messaging?
