Guess what the hottest ticket in town is?

The Charleston International Film Festival? Cool, but nah.  Spoleto? Maybe.  Piccolo Spoleto? Hot, but not even close.

Google plans to begin testing on Wednesday night a new feature called YouTube RealTime that lets you and your friends share in the moment what you're doing with the site.

YAY! YouTube RealTime! And J.K. on the 'hot ticket' - my attempt at being clever. Those 3 events above are rad - check them out.

"RealTime is building on the success of the YouTube friend activity feed, letting people see what their friends are watching, rating, commenting on, etc.," Google said about the feature, which the company plans to start offering to invitees tonight.

The real-time web is all the rage, with FriendFeed widely deploying live feeds earlier this month and Facebook working hard on bringing real-time streams to its homepage. Now YouTube is looking to get in on the action. Updates will be shown in a persistent toolbar, which means that users will be able to see them no matter where they are on the site. The new feature is currently being tested on a limited basis, and I got my hands on an invite. I haven't yet tried it out, but conceptually it reminds me of how Photophlow enlivens Flickr.

This is going to be big. While real time feeds are bound to increase engagement on most sites, I think they’ll work especially well on YouTube. Many people go to YouTube without any particular video in mind - they simply go to watch something. Now as they browse through the site looking for the latest videos to go viral, they’ll also get constant status updates as their friends stumble across cool videos too. It’s tough to ignore a popup notification that your friend just watched a video called “Cat rides skateboard” - you’re going to want to see for yourself, and then your friends will see an update alerting them about the video, creating an endless loop.

I didn’t think it was possible, but YouTube is about to become even more viral.

Apparently, YouTube isn’t keeping this as small as I initially thought - each person to get an invite will get 25 invites of their own. It's an opt-in service, so people can invite others to be their friends, and friends can accept or deny the request as they see fit.

For all that people say about Google, they continue to stay relevant, and #1, becuase the keep innovating. That is why I bought a G-phone. And love it.