Have you ever wished you could share the viewing of something on YouTube even though you were unable to do so in the same room? Maybe you’re away on business and need to catch up on something important or you’re trying to watch a video clip together with a friend or relative and they live the other side of the country?

Well thanks to the power of modern technology now you can. Sync Video is a new service which lets you set up a YouTube video and invite your friends via a link and email to watch it together. The service gives you everything you need to do the deed, including a neat little chat box so you can exchange romantic or snidey comments during the viewing depending on your temperament.

You also have the power to set up a playlist to share, you can resize to full screen, and use a bookmarklet from within your browser to select titles to watch quickly and easily. One of the coolest features, though, is the ability to set up an instant room for shared viewing simply by adding ‘sync-‘ before the YouTube video address. So for example, visiting http://sync-youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ in your web browser will automatically set up a viewing room for you and your friends to share that title together. Brilliant idea.

The whole service is currently in beta and there seems to be no way to sign in or set up an account, everything is created and destroyed on the fly, but even so it’s a great idea and extremely well done. We can see lots of use for this in different areas, so it’s definitely a bookmark for us.