YouTube : a new video page and April Fools ASCII

The well known video sharing site released a new video page for the 1st of April, setting an April Fools joke for users.

YouTube inaugurated their new video page, allowing users to watch online videos. This was unveiled at the beginning of the year with requests that users provide feedback before being released for general use, an event which occurred today.

With this new page, YouTube decided that they wanted to "return to the basics" by highlighting the different interactions possible with video. As usual with such changes, the work was undertaken with the aim of simplifying the pages functions and appearance, with notably less links being displayed, as these have been reduced by half.

Above the video being displayed, you will find a link to the user who uploaded the video so that you can subscribe to their YouTube channel, or directly watch other published videos of theirs. Under the video, the description can be seen with pieces of information like its category and associated tags. Additional information can then be found by clicking on zones which are highlighted when passing the mouse curser over them.

Further down, the toolbar has been simplified and refreshed with additional sharing tools, an additional play list, source code which can be integrated into third party sites and an option to alert YouTube to the present of offensive content. We also notice that the stars evaluation model has disappeared, replaced by an "I like this video/don’t like this video". To the right of this bar, a video statistics are (Insight), providing information about the number of times the video has been watched, number of comments left, comments about the video, etc.

The comments have been reorganised so that exchanges by the video’s author and users can be followed, while the best and most recent comments are better organised.

To the right of the video, a field is dedicated to announcements about the next video, just above the recommended videos.

With these various changes and improved user experience, YouTube is aiming to get internet users to spend more time on their site.


YouTube’s April Fools
It should be noted that YouTube didn’t forget to play an April Fools joke. Under the guise of saving $1 per second in terms of bandwidth costs, a text mode was also implemented: TEXTp. This is to be discovered through the video player’s commands.