Sure, Clubhouse is the hot ticket right now that everyone’s trying to clone right now but before audio-centric social media platforms were all the rage, TikTok was the thing to copy. Frankly, it’s still the thing that people want to replicate as Instagram puts more focus on its Reels feature and Google goes all-in on YouTube Shorts, which is finally launching in the US. YouTube Shorts was announced last year in September and was initially launched in India only but the beta has reached a point where it’s reached to spread its wings and fly on over to North America.

Of course, the fact that we know this is a complete mistake as Google seemingly posted an update on YouTube Shorts before it was ready to announce anything; the blog post confirming the international growth of the feature was promptly deleted after it was discovered. The post was dated for the 18th, so clearly someone was a little over agree with the “confirm” button.

So what is YouTube Shorts?

Well… it’s TikTok. It’s a Google-based platform for users and content creators to share short-form videos with one another but the build that was available in India was seemingly rather limited. That’s based on the features listed as coming to Shorts when it eventually expands. These include the ability to add text to a video, resample audio from YouTube videos or sort the videos in your feed based on a particular audio track, perfect for folks who like to immerse themselves in the latest meme/dance trend.

We don’t know, we’re old.

The expansion brings with it a bigger music library as YouTube is adding “millions” of songs to the platform from hundreds of different labels. It seems like a rather fleshed out attempt at competing with TikTok. YouTube already has an install base of 2.3 billion active users so it’s not exactly like they’re pitching without an audience. One can only assume Google doesn’t want their latest social media experiment to go the way of Google+…

Source: TNW