YouTube has posted some release notes about recent features/improvements, including auto-sharing of YouTube activity to Buzz (you could previously set YouTube to auto-share video uploads to Buzz, but YouTube has expanded that to include likes, favorites, comments and subscriptions).

To be clear, the YouTube blog was not clear about exactly when these updates started showing up (we get the impression that they were this week, however) but regardless, YouTube just posted about them today.

Other updates include a progress percentage bar that tells you how much time is left from the time you upload a video until it shows up on YouTube (many other video sharing sites already do this). Also, YouTube has adjusted the interface of how it separates search results out between channels, playlists and videos, instead of larger headers search results now include badges like this:

Finally, YouTube has also introduced better captions that actually let you scroll down through the captions ahead of the video if you wish, which is kind of cool. Small updates all (though on the world’s biggest online video platform), but for die-hard users, interface and functionality improvements are always nice.