Offers options to the user for personalizing video viewing experience

YouTube is a popular place to watch and upload videos that amaze, shock or make you laugh. Most of the time, the recommendations offered to you show as soon as you log into YouTube.

Last month YouTube had released an opt-in experimental YouTube Homepage layout that promises more personalized video watching-browsing experience.

Like many others, I haven’t been blessed with loads of spare time in my day to watch amazing videos on YouTube. But whenever time permits, I do watch a couple of them. Last month we reported that Facebook is placed well behind YouTube in terms of Video Traffic generation. What keeps YouTube ahead is its myriad categories of videos, customizations options and, of course, larger reach. One doesn’t require any login to watch a YouTube video unless it’s protected by the user.

Following are the new features that you can find on YouTube:

Combined list:

Your subscriptions, recommendations, and YouTube activity of your friends are all combined into one stream. Many websites or dedicated video bloggers upload videos regularly and offer channel subscription on YouTube. Once you subscribe to their channel, your personal homepage would show all videos instead of the latest one. This way you don’t miss out on any videos from your subscribed channel. For instance, Google keeps uploading videos regularly and the combined list helps me keep a track of them.

Re-find viewed videos or just gray it:

Just like the recent history feature, the new Experimental home page will offer quick view of your recent likes and favorites. Experimental homepage is quite helpful for those who favorite videos in order to watch it later. Also, all the watched videos would be grayed when they appear on your YouTube home page. This helps in quickly finding the videos to be watched and the ones already watched.

Quick Add-to Options:

Not many are lucky enough to have the bandwidth and time to sit and watch YouTube videos all day. Thankfully, the new homepage interface lets one quickly add the video to Favorites, Queue, Watch Later or to a Playlist. This feature is meant for web crawlers who spend limited time browsing for videos on YouTube. Just add to your favorites and watch the video later. To do that, hover anywhere on the video and a + sign with a drop down option will show up. Click on the drop down to do the needful.

Delete anything:

Just hover over the video image and click on the x to remove the video. Quite useful to tell YouTube the kind of videos you don’t want to see upfront.

Load More Videos & Easy inbox:

Now you can load more videos on the home page by simply clicking the button and you don’t even have to leave the homepage. This is similar to the buttons found in social network timelines of Twitter and Facebook. Message Inbox has been improved, as you get details like Comments and Messages right on the top of the page. If you’ve got messages to your Inbox or someone has replied to your comment then you’ll get the updates of the same on the top of the page

All YouTube addicts who haven’t tried the Experimental YouTube home page can opt for it here. After using it for almost a month, I really found the new experimental YouTube useful to keep myself updated with all geeky as well as funny videos that are uploaded frequently.