I came across a little trick today that can save you (and the person you send to) time with YouTube videos.

Say you want to share a YouTube link on your favorite social media platform. So, for example, you send the following link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5HWGw1f2YQ

Unfortunately, you really wanted your friend to start listening at your favorite part of the video (not from the beginning). Let’s assume your favorite part starts 3 minutes and 8 seconds into the video. With a simple hack, you can share this video and make it start playing at the 3 minutes and 8 seconds mark.

Instead of the original link, send the following link instead:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5HWGw1f2YQ#t=3m8s

You’ll notice the following was added to the first YouTube link: #t=3m8s

#Time=()Minutes()Seconds

Now you should be able to start the YouTube videos you send anywhere you want!

I’ve noticed this only works on the first time played. After playing the link once, you’ll need to copy the link into your browser. Clicking refresh at the end of the video will simply start the video over from the beginning.

Apparently, you can do this trick with embedding as well:

If you want to embed a YouTube video that starts to become interesting somewhere in the middle, there’s a simple way to skip the boring part. YouTube’s embedded player has a parameter that lets you specify the number of seconds that should be skipped before starting to play the video. Here’s how you should edit the code: append &start=[number of seconds from the start of the video] to both URLs.

<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/abcdefghijk&hl=en&fs=1&start=15“></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/abcdefghijk&hl=en&fs=1&start=15” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>

For example, the video below includes some excerpts from Google Chrome’s launch, but I skipped to the last part, when Sergey Brin answers some interesting questions.

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4. Trials of Law School Uses YouTube to Promote Video
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6. Social Media in Plain English
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10. Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video