Google has announced a new feature for its YouTube video service that will allow users to send updates directly to their subscribers through the medium of YouTube Bulletins.

According to a page added to the YouTube Help pages, bulletins are an effort to create an easy method of communication between channel owners and subscribers. The bulletins work in a way that will likely be familiar to anyone who remembers the MySpace Bulletins of old; they’re posted directly to the “recent activity” module on you subscribers’ various homepages, meaning that they’ll see it as they log in. It’s also displayed on the channel page itself.

According to the page itself, you can send a bulletin to your subscribers fairly easily, following five steps,

“1. Sign in to your YouTube account
2. Go to your Channel page
3. At the top of the channel page (below the Search bar), you’ll see an “edit channel” section with various grey tabs (“Post Bulletin”, “Settings:, “Themes and Colours”, “Modules”, and “Videos and Playlists”). Click “Post Bulletin”.
4. This section will expand and show you bulletin options. This is where you’ll enter the message you’d like to include in the bulletin which you send to subscribers. You can include a personal note and a video link. As you fill in the personal note to your subscribers, you’ll see a preview of the bulletin appear in the preview field to the right of the text field.
5. Once you’re satisfied with your bulletin, click the “Post Bulletin” button. Your bulletin will then be send out to your subscribers.”

Of course, this moves YouTube in a fairly interestingly Facebook direction. While Facebook’s big draw is, for many, its ubiquity, the status updates the service provides have become something that many associate with Facebook specifically. That’s true to the extent where many descriptions of micro-blogging service Twitter boil down to, “It’s like Facebook but with only the news bit…” While YouTube will likely avoid that kind of description, it’ll be interesting to see just how much these bulletins manage to change the service, if indeed, they do so at all.

Regardless, expect YouTube to be a lot more active as people get used to having the option to message all of their subscribers…