YouTube, the number two product Google has in its arsenal is about to get more social sprinkled into it by way of Google+. The video site announced today that users can start promoting their Google+ profiles on their YouTube Channels as a way to drive visitors to their presence on Google’s social network.
Along with that change, a few others have been made such as some visual updates to the homepage and channel feed as well as tweaks to its annotation feature.
Here is a full list of changes the YouTube team shared with us today:
Google+ profile on YouTube
Want to share your Google+ profile or Google+ Page on your YouTube channel? We’ve added a feature to let you promote your presence on G+. We’re looking for other ways to bring the benefits of Google+ to your YouTube channel, so as always please give us your feedback!
You can now share videos and playlists in your Channel Feed by posting a Channel Bulletin. When you’re on your Feed tab you’ll see a box “Post to Feed,” where you can enter a comment and add a link to share a video or a playlist. When you’ve posted the bulletin, it will show up in your Channel Feed with your comment below the video. Viewers who are subscribed to your channel will be notified when you post to your feed in their homepage feed.
After experiments and lots of your feedback, we’re releasing an update to how events are displayed in the feed. The update focuses on three main changes: (1) the video title is more prominent for upload and sharing events, (2) aggregated events now feature a “+more” button which will bring more attention to the event than the previously smaller notification and (3) adding videos to a playlist has a new cleaner styling.
Customizing your videos is easier with our new annotations features. We’ve been adding more options to the Annotations Editor like a new annotation type, a full color palette and a new timeline. We’ve also added annotation styles, which lets you choose a templated design to apply to your videos. You can quickly pick a design for your annotation and apply it your video. Start using these today in the Editor by clicking the arrow next to any upload in the Video Manager.
With these updates, Google is making its design more uniform on all of its properties. The cleaner interface on YouTube now looks more like what you’ll see on Google+ and Gmail.
The Google+ integration makes complete sense, as the company will hope to attract all of the popular talent from YouTube to create a similar following on the social network.
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