YouTube Early Spring Cleaning

YouTube just announced that they would be doing some early spring cleaning:

What will this mean to you? Well, it means you’ll see some things about the site design evolving to be more consistent across the site. And some things that haven’t worked as smoothly as we would have liked them to will get the attention they deserve. Lastly, we may determine that some things we tried out just didn’t fly and remove them from the site.

YouTube doesn’t offer any specifics on what will be changed, revamped, or removed but here are a few of my ideas/predictions:

Comment System Revamp

The comment system is not what I’d expect from a Google owned site. They could learn a thing or two from the folks at Disqus on how to make a comment system that works (I use Disqus to power the comments on this blog, so I’m a little biased).

But in all honesty, you can’t easily reference other comments using @ replies, and when you reply to a comment it doesn’t stay connected or nested under the comment you replied to. For example, someone commented on my video saying that I should shave my goatee. I replied to them. Easy. However, now my reply is being shown without the original comment, so I look like a crazy person talking to myself:

Video Thumbnails

YouTube partners can upload their own thumbnails, but your average user (or Brand Channel) can’t. I can understand why YouTube doesn’t allow everyone to just upload their own thumbnails (every thumbnail would have cleavage in it), but offering only 3 options seems a little limiting. I have a feeling that YouTube will either give more thumbnail options, or allow you to choose a specific time in the video to capture the thumbnail. Pretty please !

Rating Stars

We’ve already discussed how most people that rate a video will rate it 5 stars, so I’m not sure how useful a star system is for YouTube. I know others have talked about switching to an opposable digit orientation system (thumbs up/thumbs down).

My vision would be for YouTube to replace ratings with sentiment tracking. So instead of just showing how many ‘thumbs up’ a video got in general, you could see which part(s) of the video got the most thumbs up/down. Or instead of thumbs, they could have ‘LOL’ or ‘WTF’ buttons to see what other viewers thought were the funniest or most shocking parts of the video.

YouTube Groups

YouTube Groups have been put in the corner like Baby from Dirty Dancing. They don’t exist in the top level navigation anymore, and you can’t even filter your search to find groups. Because of this I have a feeling that Groups are one of those things that YouTube “tried out that just didn’t fly”.

My idea would be to transform Groups into Group Viewing Rooms. YouTube has already tested real time sharing:

Combining this feature with Groups would allow group leaders to schedule group showings of videos with group members and provide some basic chat functionality while watching.