By Sharad Harjai:
With Channels 3.5, as they call it, Google has made an attempt to make YouTube look more categorized and easier to find content. At least that’s what the 1st look says. For YouTube, which is the 2nd most visited website in the world, after its owner Google, to search content and gets 3 billion hits per day, it perfectly makes sense to have a user interface that makes more content visible to the users.
The whole effort is an extension to the project that YouTube rolled out couple of months back, with a funny name Cosmic Panda, and a super annoying Nyan Cat video. The whole Effort was to make video watching video experience richer and watching a playlist and the bigger player size were a part of this project.
With a look that somehow boosts your ego, the homepage highlights your channel and the content displayed revolves around your channel and subscriptions. Also, the tabs like Trending, Popular, Music makes it easy to browse through the latest videos and might help you find some interesting stuff to watch (Like this). If you have not tried creating your channel yet, it’s worth giving a shot. All you need is a Gmail id.
You can now also connect to Google+ apart from Facebook, twitter, MySpace and Orkut (that I am sure you anyway won’t be using anymore) and get all the feeds right in your homepage. Your channel, as new Facebook cover photo on the timeline (that Facebook has not rolled out to all the users yet), will also have an option to add a featured video. Not to mention, the new release also comes with some new themes and lets you customize channels easily.
Too early to say how users are reacting but it will definitely destroy more man hours online.