Heads-up. YouTube Changes Underway.

The team at YouTube are up to something…I logged-in to YouTube today (1/2/2012) and was surprised to see a completely new look and feel, as well as more features. When I visited the site two weeks ago, it didn’t look like this. Clearly, the YouTube folks are stewing up a change. This must be in beta because under my Video Manager account, it offers me the opportunity to go back to the “old look.”

Now that the major social media players are on the cusp of maturity, we’re seeing many new layouts, features and functionality from YouTube, Twitter (back in December ’10) and Facebook’s launch of Timeline.

It appears YouTube is making an effort to increase engagement and increase user-friendliness by the looks of the options on the left navigation bar.

• Add channels
• New comments
• Subscriptions. Click on one of the channels you subscribe to and see it’s most recent activity.
• Social. This gives you the option of connecting your current social networking outlets such as Google+, Facebook, Twitter and Orkut.
• From YouTube: Trending, Popular, Music, Entertainment
• Suggested channels. Use this to find what you’re missing or what YouTube thinks you’ll like.

The navigation options on the left side help us find what we’re really after, whether it be trending videos, most popular videos, YouTube activity from our Facebook friends and more.

With a new YouTube home page comes a new look and feel for YouTube channels. Here’s an example from one of the channels I subscribe to, which is StyleMint. Ok ok, no Mary-Kate and Ashley jokes…I subscribe for the fashion snippets. First thing I noticed was channel subscribers can now easily interact with the channel by posting a comment in the status box (top right). Prior to the “makeover,” the status box was toward the bottom and difficult to find (red arrow in image below).

Do you frequent YouTube often? What are your thoughts on the change? More change may be coming, but I wanted this post to be a heads-up for you all!

Here’s a snapshot of the old YouTube channel layout, from MINIUSA.