YouTube Beta Testing New User Profile Pages

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: May 14th, 2009 | 2 Comments

As usual i like to let everyone know about the new things happening around YouTube, its not even like i use YouTube a lot for uploading videos i just use if for watching videos, i just like to keep in the know of what is changing with the YouTube site :D Anyway here is the latest change that YouTube soon hope to be implementing across every YouTube users profile.

It is a complete revamp on the appearence of how your user profile will look. They have already made changes within the last year in relation to users profile pages by making the width of the page wider to enable having a more widescreen video on the profile page. Now however they are going to scrap the old style user pages and replace them with a more fresh look.

When looking at how the new profiles will look, it makes me wonder since they differ so much from the general appearence of the rest of the site, if they will soon be releasing a complete re-design?

There are however a few main reasons on why they have decided to change the appearence of the user profile pages. They have now made it that the featured video is on the top left of the page with a list of the users uploaded videos, favourite videos and playlists on the right hand side of the video box.  When you choose to watch one of the videos the user uploaded or favourited then it will just simply change the video that is in the featured box.

This is done so that when someone is watching a video they will spend a bit more time on a users page and perhaps watch a few more of there videos :D, it is a good idea so that more of your videos you upload might finally get that recognition it deserves :D.

They are also now impleting a new method of editing how you edit the look of your profile. They have added a new channel editing toolbar at the top of the page so that you can choose which modules to include in your site or not. Also you can edit your profiles title and add some tags to your profile, And of course you can edit the colour scheme of the profile live on the page without having to constantly flip back and foward to and from your channel page to see how it actually looks :D This is a great addition to the page , it makes customization a lot easier :D.

You can now also move the different modules on your profile by simply clicking the arrows in the direction you want to move the modules too :D, yet another method to try and make channel customization a little easier :D.

I think that this new channel editor bar takes up a little too much of the screen, it would be better if it would auto hide and a little tab was just there so that when you want to edit your page it will only appear then by hovering or clicking on it :D Other than that problem i think that the new idea of changing th channels layout is great and look foward to when they are finished with all the new modifications they are adding.

Also as a note the channels are in BETA testing so this means that things can go wrong such as modules not appearing and videos not working on your channel, this is why it is slightly hidden away and not so straight foward to sign up to the beta test! So far i have not noticed any problems, and if you do find any you can simply report them to the develpoers since they have set up a mini blog to keep you updated on new fixes and changes they have implemented and also they encourage you to input your opinion or any faults you expierence.

You can have a look at the new channel design in action over on my YouTube channel page.

And now this is how you can implement this new beta test channel design, simply head over to www.youtube.com/super_seekrit and follow the simple one click of a button :D And they also keep a copy of how your profile used to look like in case you dont like the new design, so you have nothing to loose with trying it out :P.

Youtube Beta!

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: April 30th, 2008 | 0 Comments

Yep that's right Youtube have now begun to go into the stages of beta testing. Lately you may have noticed a few slight changes here and there on youtube, a lot of downtime on the servers amongst other things, this is due to Youtube upgrading itself. Youtube has brought out some nice new features over the past few weeks. They have upgraded the surrounding's of the video box when watching a video which makes it look more dynamic and in my opinion it makes it look better. Another thing that Youtube have updated is after you log into your account you no longer get redirected back to the front page with your subscription updates in a small box you now get redirected to a totally different page which looks a bit plain looking and i do not really like this new update i think they could do with reverting this update back.

However its not all bad, Youtube have just released today there new beta testing of there new video player. I think it looks great, have a look at the picture below to see the new video player(left), Old video player is on the right.

I think that they decided to finally upgrade there video player because over the past while they have being allowing a higher-quality version of videos to be displayed. i think that with this new player it will load there videos faster and also display them clearer than there old video player.

I think its great that Youtube are finally getting around to upgrading there service, i think these few upgrades are just a taste of what else Youtube have to come. Hopefully Youtube will upgrade there audio quality to output more Bass sound as most videos require it. I have also just found out that Youtube have upgraded there upload video file size limit, you used to only be allowed to upload 100mb per video and a maximum length of 10 minutes which gave a poor quality video, however now they have increased the file size limit from 100 mb to 1024mb (1GB) and video length still remains the same at 10 minutes, this will no doubt be the beginning of High Definition videos on Youtube.