Google Video URL Markers to Bookmark Positions

If you have missed the Google Factory Tour Video, I suggest you watch it atleast once. This video has interesting presentations from Google Managers, Q&A's with several key Google executives and a tour of Google Products (but unlike the name, there's no virtual tour of Googleplex)

The only problem with Google Factory Tour video is the long duration - the video is exactly 5hours, 39minutes and 41seconds long.

For me the most interesting part of the Google Tour Video is when Marrisa Mayer take the stage from Eric Schmidt at exactly 9minutes 32seconds. So how can I bookmark that particular video clip position so that when I share that video, it starts to play on my friend's from exactly that position and not before?

That's now possible by appending a short anchor text to the Google Video URL that instructs the video service to buffer video only from the duration mentioned in the URL. Google Video lets you forget the guess work

Here's an illustration.

The original URL of the video is

video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3383042311441257769

We want it to resume playing at 9minutes 32 seconds, so we will append 9m32sec to the above URL

video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3383042311441257769#9m32s

The above feature is also useful when the video is long and you are not able to watch the video in one long sitting but only in bits-n-pieces. So the trick is to pause the video, write down the current clip duration, append it to the URL and bookmark it. Now when you again get to watch the video, you can start it by clicking the bookmark. This is just like watching movies in a DVD player where it remembers the time when you paused the movie and resumes only from that position.

Google Video has definitely let loose a killer feature and you should expect Youtube to introduce a similar thing in a day or two.