New YouTube Personalized Homepage

The world's biggest video sharing service is preparing to revamp the personalized homepage for everybody. Their work is not out yet, but the team has already been creating a lot of buzz around it, and offered a short written description for all of the changes that would occur. The blog post relating to it is extremely joyous and unimaginably optimist as to how the users will react.

Truth be told, if the changes are half as good as the YouTube team has let us believe, it will be worth it to wait for it anxiously for a couple more days. In order to make the most interesting videos to everybody easier to access, alongside the regular Featured and Most Popular video tabs, there will be some personalized recommendations, the latest videos from everybody's subscribers and an option to view what friends are doing, uploading, rating or viewing.

It sounds like a lot of action and a lot of fun, although a little disorganized. They break it down for us: the recommendations feature actually discerns (the term is not really that out there) based on your viewing history and rating of videos, processed by a well-built algorithm, what videos you might be interested in, even though they might have as little as 10 views and an average number of stars.

The subscribers that anxiously await for the video producers to come up with something new will be 'fed' with the three most recently updated subscriptions. The layout will be changed accordingly, so there won't be any problems with all of the recent activity.

Speaking about activity, the new personalized homepage will include a 'Friend Activity' feature, the team says, that will make it easier to stay in the loop with what they have been doing and the other way round, via feeds.

All of the above, plus the dashboard to be included, that will place stats about each user's Inbox and information about their videos front and center, make it sound like the YouTube team is slowly transitioning the Google-owned video sharing service to a social network that evolves around the uploading and viewing of clips. But then again, that's the whole point of Web 2.0, isn't it?