A handful of updates for everyone to check out

Dec 17, 2007 11:17 GMT  ·  By

The YouTube Team have been busy little bees in the past month, they've helped Santa Google customize its video sharing service to get it ready for the Holidays with a new?well? almost everything. They've done some great work with everything that users complained about, and now if you go to their homepage, you will see the end results.

They've tweaked the videos tab in order to get the Categories and Video browse pages into one single new and easier to navigate home for video search. It has all the old functions and a new one has been added, the "Spotlight" section that allows users to scroll through featured videos. The old Channels and Community tabs have been given a face-lift, so that they can look at the Christmas tree without those soggy eyes that they've been complaining about. Furthermore, the Videos tab includes two new viewing options. "Click 'Most Active Today' and you'll see the current day's most buzz-worthy titles, which can then be filtered by category. Click 'Previously Popular' to find the most-viewed videos from one week ago or one month ago", the dev team says.

Some little updates, like being able as of now to choose a picture to represent your channel instead of a video, still can be overlooked when you're faced with the very useful auto-removal of your subscriptions to accounts that have been closed or suspended. Voting on your videos is now optional, you get to choose whether you want people to rank them or not with the stars that most uploaders seek.

For the music savvy, there's a big plus now, as the Music section was broken down into the different genres out there, Rock, Pop, Rap & Hip-Hop, Classical and so on.

That and the new swarming-ish look of the related videos that I wrote about on Friday make Youtube the clear first spot to hit when you're looking for videos. It is for me, anyway.