It's been awhile since our last update, but we've once again been busy working on bringing you lots of new features and functionality. Going forward, we're committed to bringing you something new each and every week, so check back here often, we're going to have lots to say.

We hope you'll be as excited as we are about these recent changes to the site:

• November nano-a-day Giveaway
  We're giving away one brand new 4GB iPod nano every day in November! Entering is easy, simply Sign up for a YouTube account. Already have an account? Invite a friend. The more friends you invite, the more chances you have to win. See Contest Rules and Details for more information.
• Playlists
  You can now organize all your favorite videos into Playlists! To add to your Playlists, watch a video and click the 'Add to Playlists' button. Once you've added videos, go to My Playlists to view, edit, delete or create new Playlists.
• My Subscriptions
  With our new Subscriptions Center you can now subscribe to any user's videos (or invite them to subscribe to yours) so that all of their videos show in one convenient location. Just go to My Subscriptions and enter the username of the person whose videos you'd like to subscribe to and click the 'Subscribe' button. Or, click the 'Subscribe to Videos' button on their profile page and viola! their videos will immediately appear under My Subscriptions.
• New XML-RPC/REST APIs
  If you're a developer with a desire to integrate YouTube with your application or website, you'll be pleased to know we have a new suite of APIs available. These APIs are available through two interfaces: REST and XML-RPC. Moving forward, we plan on working closely with fellow developers to ensure that the APIs we provide meet the needs of third-party sites looking for a plug-n-play video solution for their sites. Browse the new APIs here.
• Channels
  You're probably already familiar with Channels, but we've vastly improved this area recently. Visit Channels and click on your favorite topic (Music, Pets & Animals, Sports etc), you'll now get to see specific information for that Channel including: recently added videos, who the most active users are and the top watched videos. Channels are a great way to easily find the videos you're most interested in seeing.
• More FAQs
  We've updated our help section with more of your frequently asked questions. Want to know how to embed videos on MySpace/Friendster? Do you want to make your embedded videos autoplay? Do you spend many sleepless nights wondering "YouTube is such a great website, can it really be free??" For answers to these questions and more, visit our help section. And remember, our FAQs come straight from our users, so please don't hesitate to contact [link to contact us] us with your questions, issues and comments.
• Full Screen View
  It's easy to see the full screen version of any video, just click the fullscreen icon in the bottom right of the video while watching a video, and the full screen version will open in a new window. Make sure you have pop-up blocking disabled for YouTube.com, otherwise this feature will not work.

We are ecstatic to announce the changes we made to the site last night. As a result of many sleepless nights, we have completed a very feature-rich release. Once again, many of these changes are in direct response to your feedback, so please keep them coming. And the changes include...

• First up, video flagging. At the bottom of the video watch page, you will notice a new section for flagging a video. If you encounter a video that's inappropriate or copyrighted, please use this feature to notify us. We will aggressively monitor these submissions and respond as quickly as we can.
• Second, Friends & Sharing. We poured a tremendous amount of time and effort into enhancing our sharing functionality. With the new sharing feature, an easy-to-use pop-up appears over the video. From here, you can choose with whom you'd like to share the video with. This feature is really something that you have to see to appreciate. Trust me! Log in and watch a video. Then, click on 'Share this Video'... I told you so!
• Lastly, Channels. While the video uploads have been pouring in, we realized it grew ever more difficult for viewers to find relevant and interesting videos. Though tags are very efficient at identifying specific details about content, we wanted to further simplify the browsing experience. With the release of Channels, similar content will be categorized and grouped into common channels. By "flipping" to a channel such as Short Movies or Travel & Places, you can browse through all videos within the channel.

Once again, thanks for using the site! Please contact us with any suggestions or feedback.

How goes it, folks? We have added a ton of new features to our site.

• You can now embed the YouTube video player into your own webpage! That way people can view the video on your website without even coming to YouTube! See examples and instructions here.
  
  
• See how many videos other people have watched :) Just click on their profile and look for the "I have watched 100 videos!" sentence under their username. Try this user for example.
  
  
• Rate videos between 1 and 5 stars. Just click on the appropriate rating underneath the video while it's playing.
  
  
• Find the top rated videos on the site.
  
  
• Allow/Disallow comments on your own videos. You can set this preference for each video.
  
  
• Allow/Disallow ratings on your own videos. You can set this preference for each video.
  
  
• Email preferences: tell us for which events you like to receive emails.
  
  
• Honors: When you watch a video, we'll tell you what Honors it has received (Top Viewed, Top Discussed, Top Favorite, ...). This list is shown to the right side of the video, above the related videos list. View this video as an example.

Hi there! If you are a frequent visitor to the site, you may have noticed the small improvements we've been making throughout the last week. For example, registered YouTube users will now be able to see the total views all their videos have received. In addition, you can also get a count of all the people that have added your videos to their favorites.

We have also added several more ways to explore the site. We've expanded the top viewed category to daily, weekly, and monthly from the existing All Time view. Another way to explore the site is through the Recently Featured view.

But, the real reason for updating the "What's New" page today is to announce the immediate availability of an easy, copy+paste code snippet that you can place on your website to host videos directly from there. There are three links beneath each video shown on the website. The first is a simple, permanent link to the video. The second is a way to embed a thumbnail of the video from your website.

... and the third copy+paste snippet allows you to embed and play the video directly from your website and/or blog!

Developers! Developers! Developers!

It's now possible to put an HTML snippet on your website that automatically pulls up the latest videos with a certain tag word. An example of this, let's say you want to show all videos related to Mexico on your website. However, you want your website to be automatically updated whenever a new video is uploaded with the tag word Mexico. By using the snippet below, you can do this!

HTML Snippet for Mexico

<iframe id="videos_list" name="videos_list" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20051102071548if_/http://www.youtube.com/videos_list.php?tag=mexico" scrolling="auto" width="265" height="400" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0"></iframe>
By replacing the word mexico in the above snippet, you can show any tagged videos on your website and have your site automatically updated whenever a new video is uploaded with that tag!

You know, I really can't believe the pace that we're releasing new features. I mean, it really does seem like like just yesterday we launched something and, yet, here we are again... back with more.

And here they are:

• Video Sharing
  
  On YouTube you've always been able to upload Public and Private videos. Public videos are for everyone to see, and Private videos are only seen by the people that get the secret link URL to that video.
  
  Now you can share videos more easily with friends and family by inviting them directly through the My Friends tab, and by adding them to your Friends or to your Family groups.
  
  For each video that you uploaded to YouTube, you can decide to share the video with Friends, Family or both.


• Ability to Remove Comments on your own videos
  
  You can now remove comments left by others on your videos.

Many people have asked us how to put a list of videos on MySpace. We've made a Flash application that can be embedded into your MySpace page! It looks like this:



For details on how to do this, please see help.

• Attach a video to messages!
  If you want to send someone else on YouTube a cool video, you no longer have to paste the URL into the message. You will now see a dropdown menu where you can select the video that you want to attach to the message! The message recipient can simply click on the thumbnail to view the video.
  


• Show related video in comments
  While browsing through the site, we've seen that many users reference videos they've posted when they leave comments in other people's videos. To help this effort, we've pushed out a new feature that allows you to reference one of your videos directly from the comments section. Watch a video and see this feature in action!
  

Whew! A couple busy, busy weeks. These are some of the changes we've made:

• New front page
  We have redesigned the front page to better capture what YouTube is about. The featured videos lend an instant snapshot of the cool videos added recently to the site. Upload your interesting video and watch it get featured!
  


• Browse pages
  The browse page contains many, many more items for each of the categories. Each category now contains 100 items separated into 5 pages.
  


• UTF-8 support in tags
  Finally! UTF-8 support has been added to tags. You can now attach UTF-8 tags to your video. You can also go back to videos you've previously uploaded and add UTF-8 tags to those. Furthermore, UTF-8 searching is enabled. Try searching for 王力宏.
  


• HTML-enabled emails
  Emails being sent from the system have been converted over to using HTML.

As always, while you're perusing the site, if you notice anything you'd like changed, please feel free to shoot us a message.


You can now add a field for "Date Recorded" and "Location" to each of your videos. This information will show up when your video is viewed. Also, the location you enter becomes a clickable link that brings you to Google maps. To associate a date or location to your video, please go to my videos and click on the edit video button.


Greetings everyone!

Thanks for visiting YouTube! We have been most impressed with the reception from our users. In an effort to communicate improvements and changes, this blog was created.

So, first off, we are extremely happy with the feedback we've received thus far. We are continuously working towards our goal of making YouTube the digital video repository for the Internet. That said, please let us know if there's something you'd like us to address -- we really, really, really do value any input our users send. We read every e-mail that is sent to us. Go ahead, try it; we'll prove it!

Anyway, back to the recent changes. This last week, we've added many improvements to the site:

• New browse videos page
  We have been receiving many video uploads each day. While this is really exciting, we realized that it has gotten increasingly more difficult to find videos you want to watch. We have made an attempt to address this problem by launching a convenient browse page. From here, you can find the most recent videos, the most popular videos, the most discussed videos, the most added to favorites videos, and a random browse page.
  


• Searching by username
  Prior to this week, it was difficult to find videos by a certain user. For example, I've enjoyed every video Cobaltgruv has ever put up. Instead of having to search for a video of his, I can now type "cobaltgruv" in the search box and get a result set of all his videos.
  


• Linking your videos from your homepage
  Many YouTube users maintain their own websites. A common request from users was to have a convenient way to link to videos users have uploaded to YouTube from these websites. We just released a feature that enables users to easily do this -- linking to one's YouTube videos from anywhere on the Internet. By adding a tiny snippet of HTML code on your homepage, you can have your YouTube videos directly show up inside your homepage! For more details on how to do this, please see the help section.