YouTube has started rolling out some new features to help us better manage our YouTube accounts. But I would like to think that it is just the site’s first step towards making itself more “social network-like” video uploading site. Anyway, the beta features include a new inbox, my contacts and my video
Now sporting a slicker interface, YouTube’s messaging function now loads faster and has what YouTube calls “smarter throttling system”. Video comments, responses, shared videos, friend invites and personal messages can now be displayed in a unified fashion, including a new counter for unread messages in various message categories. Also, multiple recipient messaging was enabled. As for friends invites, the newest now appears on top of the list.
For the My Contacts feature, again YouTube is making it easier for us users to create and organize our friends and subscribers. For instance, we can now select multiple contacts at once to view their details, apply labels to these contacts and send messages to them. And to make it even easier to identify our contacts, we can now add their real names and email address. Likewise, Friends label can now be resereved exclusively for users who have sent their confirmation to be our friends.
Finally, for the My Video feature, the video management tools has been redesigned. Among its new features are; viewing details for all our uploaded videos, sorting filters for time, date added, views and ratings, collapsible menus for editing video information, thumbnails and options for broadcasting and video sharing.
As always, these are all part of more good things to come, and are essential features that YouTube should have introduced a long time ago. But its never too late for changes anyway, especially now that the competition is starting to heat up with various video uploading sites and services popping out on the web from here and there.
