Official YouTube Blog: December 2005

Logged In Home Page

We finally cleaned this page up. It's been one of my personal #1 pet peeves with the site that I'd rather see the logged out home page, than the logged in home page. Every single time I login, all I see is my subscribed videos, and all of the cool new content is pushed way down the page. So, we finally cleaned this up, and added a cool new scrolling format for viewing videos. We've also added this 'video inbox' idea. Basically anytime someone sends you a video, or you get a subscription, it will appear in your video 'inbox'.

Subscriptions Center

Again, we just cleaned up the UI for this feature but we also added the ability to subscribe to tags. Conceptually, I really dig the idea of subscribing to tags, and I'm eager to see if the community uses this feature.

New Video Player

New look and feel for the video player. Hopefully you all will find this cleaner and easier to use.

Blocking/Reporting a User

Sure, we would all like to believe that people are basically good, but unfortuently the truth of the matter is on any site like ours, there are going to be problem users. Blocking a user is now the easiest way to stop a harassing or malicious user. From both your message center, and from the user's profile page, you can choose to block that user. This prevents the user from commenting on your videos, or sending you messages. Additionally, you can report a user to us from their profile page if you feel the user has been continuously abusing YouTube or posting offensive content.

Message Center

We cleaned up some of the old annoying things about the message center, like not being able to delete new messages. Hopefully this will make the message center easier to use, and will help encourage inter member communications.

Profiles
We added 'my recent videos' to all user profiles. This is really just a baby step towards us continuing to build out user profiles and allow for more customized content.