Internet. Serious Business.

When I first went to Youtube yesterday I found that they had finally unveiled their Beta to us all. I never try Beta versions of anything. I don’t get paid for it so I’m not going to waste my time. Free labor is for chumps. If you do this for stuff like websites you are a chump.

While some of the changes are welcome, it is going to take some getting used to. The comments were the biggest upgrade I noticed. This has long been one of the biggest annoyances of Youtube for me over the years. It doesn’t update the comments when you post one, you have to reload the video and start playing it again to see the new ones, and it was just a big derp derp that liked to run the batteries on my laptop out. The new comments have added pages to make them a bit easier to update as well as a couple of the “Highest” Rated” comment sat the top to give you some celebrity status if you made a funny.

Take a look at Obama’s latest video page to see to see the examples I am going to discuss.

I’ve seen people complain about the new ranking system (used to be a 5 star system), but I think it is much more useful with the Like/Don’t Like system. At least this way the sorting of videos can become much easier to do. Finding the most disliked videos on Youtube should be a lot easier now. They took the Digg.com route basically, which has worked well.

Now for the page itself. Everything has gone to a Java/AJAX-y sort of look. All the comment stuff needs to be hovered over so that you can see the options now. Not a big deal to me. It adds ore white space to teh page, and I like the cleaner look.

The Related, and Other videos by this user has changed quite a bit, however. Instead of the description up top, and the videos easily seen like before, they moved all the info under the video. This is by far the change I dislike the most. If you want to read the info you have to open it up under the video and this pushes all the comments way down the page so you can do this. They also made the embedding, and sharing move to this area too, which pushes the comments even further down. The old way was definitely better in this regard.

Overall, it has some good things, but the change in the sidebar is just not the right way to go. I suppose there are probably options for this,b ut I haven’t looked yet. If there are let me know.

Oh…one last thing. A lot of people using Firefox have reported that their extensions, as well as their code files aren’t working with the new Youtube. This is by far the biggest issue for these people as they had the perfect set up. Someone will fix all this eventually though I’m sure.

Filed under: Videos

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