In the past few months YouTube has received a number of new features, some good, some not so good. The new features, includes a new site update which is aimed to create a more personalized experience for users. In this Post I will take a look in more detail at some of these new features.NEW PERSONALIZED HOMEPAGE
Following the launch of iGoogle it wasn’t long before Google implemented the same idea for YouTube. The new personalized, customizable YouTube homepage is aimed at making it easy for users to find the videos. Of course this is a clever step that YouTube because to gain this service users will have to log in. This will in hind sight will increase the registrations of users on YouTube, however how much will YouTube current court case impact this?
YouTube also state that since they have launched this, data has shown an increase in the number of users visiting the homepage, the number of visits made, and the number of subscriptions users have made. YouTube are of course using this data to support that the customizable feature is a not only a better experience for users, but is also helping to expose for your videos.
The actual layout of the page itself isn’t all that different from what the normal homepage looked like. The editor picks is replaced with personalized recommendations, and in addition featured videos and new videos from your friends are shown. Below the new videos from your friends, is a feature which allows you to see the latest activity from your friends. Popular clips also are still shown at the bottom of the page.
It looks like YouTube is trying to ride the current “social network wave” with increasing the interactivity with video owners and enabling you to keep track of your friends.
IMPROVED EMAIL NOTIFICATIONS
The email messages sent from YouTube have been updated with a new layout. In addition to a modernized design and many wording changes, text for comments and messages are included directly in the body of these update emails, so you can see what these messages are without having to return to YouTube and logging in.
ANNOTATIONS
YouTube launched the first of many planed interactive video editing tools - Video Annotations. Using the Video Annotations tool this allows you to insert commentary by adding speech bubbles, notes, links, and highlight boxes anywhere you want in your videos.
I like this feature and I am looking forward to YouTube enhancing this tool in the future. One way it could be improved for example is including some images/graphs which can also be added to videos.
NEW TAB FOCUSED LAYOUT
The new tab layout features a consolidation of Share, Favorites, Playlists and Flag into a dedicated tab driven box. The share tab expands out to give a more extensive range of sharing options which includes social bookmarking and voting site, the ability to post a video to a blog, and send to the friend via email. Again another sign that YouTube really are increasing the social network side of there website.
PUBLIC VIDEO STATISTICS
Commentary is now offered in a tab next to “Statistics and Info.” This tab is not only available to video owners privately through the YouTube statistics feature, (spoken about in a previous post) but also video viewers. The “Statistics and info” tab provides information on video honors and video referrals. Video honors are awards presented by YouTube, for example: the most watched video in the UK, most discussed, most responded, etc.
Other information displayed is the names of recent users who rated the video and a map of the location where the video was film. Personally I really like this feature, but I don’t really understand how this is interesting to viewers of videos? Surely this information is only of interest to the video owners?
Overall I think these are just a number of changes which will happen this year. I think a number of users will have a problem with the new layout changes due to that fact YouTube has kept the same layout for so long. We all should have expected the changes once Google got their hands on it. Let me know your thoughts on the new layout.
