Personalized YouTube Homepage

YouTube tests a new homepage that is customizable and centered on your activities. Instead of displaying the same content for all YouTube users, the new homepage looks different, depending on your preferences and your activities. Here's what's new:

* recommended videos, a feature that relies on your previous activity: favorite videos, subscribed channels
* latest from your subscriptions: 12 videos from 3 of your subscribed channels
* friend activity: a list of videos uploaded, favorited or rated by your YouTube contacts. This information is displayed only if your contacts added it to their public profiles.
* inbox: messages, friend invites, received videos.
* statistics about your videos (total views, subscribers) and your activity (subscriptions, comments).
"The goal with all of this is to gauge people's interest in having a YouTube that's tailored to the individual. Ultimately, we want to get you one step closer to the videos you'll enjoy most every time you come to the site," explains YouTube.

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/03/personalized-youtube-homepage.html

Citizentube: Watching video change our world

As you might have noticed, there's a lot of fascinating stuff that happens on YouTube every day. For example, did you know that a nine-year-old recently used YouTube to successfully campaign to save his local kickball lot? Have you seen the video of a Guatemalan lawyer who predicted his own assassination on YouTube moments before it happened? Or did you know that YouTube and Google have launched a new technology platform for political debates, which allows you to submit and vote on the most important issues you want to discuss with political candidates?

These are the sorts of things you can stay on top of with Citizentube, a special YouTube blog devoted to chronicling the way that people are using video to change the world. If you've followed news and politics on YouTube, you might have noticed that we started Citizentube as a video channel on the site a few years back, but we soon realized that keeping track of all the phenomenal uses of YouTube by posting our own videos just wasn't fast enough — so now we're blogging, too. We generally focus on two types of posts: the compelling political and social uses of YouTube that we see the community bubble up every day, and our own programming initiatives and partnerships in the political, news, and nonprofit arenas.

Our team creates opportunities for you to engage with content that goes beyond the humorous or even the educational — content that changes the way you interact with your communities, institutions, and leaders. The first initiative we launched in this space was the You Choose '08 platform and the CNN/YouTube Debates in 2007. Since then we've expanded our programming to the fields of government, activism, and news & information. On the blog, we'll post an occasional series that gives a bigger picture perspective of what's happening in the worlds of news reporting, government, and social change on YouTube.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/citizentube-watching-video-change-our.html

Movie Trailers on Youtube

YouTube has launched a new directory for movie trailers. While YouTube has had movie trailers on its site from distributors in the past, Google’s video-sharing site has launched a new channel where official trailers are organized by “Latest,” “Popular,” “In Theatres,” and “Opening Soon.”

Apple’s movie trailer platform has long been the most comprehensive and popular site in distributing online trailers. Hulu also provides a good amount of trailers on its site. Recently, YouTube launched a premium section with movies and TV shows from Crackle/Sony Pictures, CBS, MGM, Lionsgate, Starz, the BBC, Anime Network, Cinetic Rights Management, Current TV, Discovery, Documentary Channel, First Look Studios, IndieFlix, and National Geographic.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/19/youtube-plays-nice-with-the-movie-industry-puts-trailers-in-their-own-channel/

Youtube XL Announced for Big screens

recent launch from YouTube sees the video on demand site now catering to those with the smallest screens available, right up to the biggest.

Just as there is a version of YouTube optimised for watching on mobile phones, the company has now launched a version optimised for watching on large screens.

YouTube "XL" gets a new design that sees larger text, simplified navigation and a continuous play feature, which lets you search for a topic on YouTube and then press play once to watch all of the videos sequentially on that topic.

Getting from one video to the next takes just a few clicks, claims YouTube, and the action can be controlled via a Bluetooth-enabled remote control, or in some cases, your mobile phone.

With YouTube's high definition content increasing by day, and internet-enabled televisions and other home cinema devices more and more common, the world's most popular video website wanting to move onto your telly seems a logical step.

http://www.youtube.com/xl

http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/news.phtml/24574/youtube-xl-announced-big-screens.phtml

Lots of New 3D Content Added in Google Earth

Google has added thousands of new buildings to the 3D Buildings layer including 4 cities in Japan with dozens of city blocks where all the buildings are rendered in 3D, more Disney content for Orlando, nearly 4000 new 3D Warehouse models all over the planet, and more! The new coverage in Japan include: Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, Kyoto. The new 3D buildings are covered in photorealistic textures using some automated method. (NOTE: most Japan cities were already rendered with gray non-photo-textured buildings, the new buildings replace those in the areas where they have coverage.) You can see samples of the new cities here (I recomment watching it in HD)

oogle has been slowly adding cities using an unpublished methodology where vast numbers of buildings for large areas of cities are being rendered in 3D with photorealistic textures. The photos appear to be aerial in some cases, in others they seem to be from the ground. But, they are using an at least semi-automated process judging from the cases where some buildings are not properly "dressed" with the photo textures. In December Google added New York City in 3D. Here's a round up of cities which have the photorealistic 3D treatment, with the exception of these two which were added later.

http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2009/06/lots_of_new_3d_content_added_in_goo.html

Twitter experiments with new status notification

It appears Twitter is experimenting with some additional tweaks that may make status updates easier and faster for its users and could help decrease the back end load on its servers.

A semi transparent notification bar (see screenshot below), slides down from the top of the screen when you update your status via the Web. While in itself, the feature may not appear earth shattering, the fact that updating now feels extremely fluid and is almost instantaneous makes us wonder whether Twitter will begin caching tweets for delivery to its servers.

Source:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/