Official YouTube Blog: October 2005

Official Blog

It's been awhile since our last update

Tuesday, October 25, 2005

November nano-a-day Giveaway

We're giving away one brand new 4GB iPod nano every day in November! Entering is easy, simply Sign up for a YouTube account. Already have an account? Invite a friend. The more friends you invite, the more chances you have to win. See Contest Rules and Details for more information.

Playlists

You can now organize all your favorite videos into Playlists! To add to your Playlists, watch a video and click the 'Add to Playlists' button. Once you've added videos, go to My Playlists to view, edit, delete or create new Playlists.

My Subscriptions

With our new Subscriptions Center you can now subscribe to any user's videos (or invite them to subscribe to yours) so that all of their videos show in one convenient location. Just go to My Subscriptions and enter the username of the person whose videos you'd like to subscribe to and click the 'Subscribe' button. Or, click the 'Subscribe to Videos' button on their profile page and viola! their videos will immediately appear under My Subscriptions.

New XML-RPC/REST APIs

If you're a developer with a desire to integrate YouTube with your application or website, you'll be pleased to know we have a new suite of APIs available. These APIs are available through two interfaces: REST and XML-RPC. Moving forward, we plan on working closely with fellow developers to ensure that the APIs we provide meet the needs of third-party sites looking for a plug-n-play video solution for their sites. Browse the new APIs here.

Channels

You're probably already familiar with Channels, but we've vastly improved this area recently. Visit Channels and click on your favorite topic (Music, Pets & Animals, Sports etc), you'll now get to see specific information for that Channel including: recently added videos, who the most active users are and the top watched videos. Channels are a great way to easily find the videos you're most interested in seeing.

More FAQs

We've updated our help section with more of your frequently asked questions. Want to know how to embed videos on MySpace/Friendster? Do you want to make your embedded videos autoplay? Do you spend many sleepless nights wondering "YouTube is such a great website, can it really be free??" For answers to these questions and more, visit our help section. And remember, our FAQs come straight from our users, so please don't hesitate to contact us with your questions, issues and comments.

Full Screen View

It's easy to see the full screen version of any video, just click the fullscreen icon in the bottom right of the video while watching a video, and the full screen version will open in a new window. Make sure you have pop-up blocking disabled for YouTube.com, otherwise this feature will not work.