YouTube’s New Homepage Goes Social With Algorithmic Feed, Emphasis On Google+ And Facebook

YouTube is launching what the company calls the biggest redesign in its history today, including sweeping changes to its homepage and channel pages. The goal is better personalized video discovery and viewing, with a notable emphasis on social features. Think of the changes as the latest example of Google’s campaign to create a unified social layer for all of its products.
The new homepage looks a lot like Facebook, or Google+ for that matter. An activity feed view dominates the middle of the page, while a left-hand navigation bar provides a set of filters for what you see in the feed.
The default Subscriptions feed appears to include algorithmically determined video uploads and activities determined by information like what videos you’ve watched and which channels you’ve subscribed to, although YouTube group product manager Noam Lovinsky wouldn’t tell me exactly how it worked. The previous version of the homepage feed, which launched early this year, doesn’t appear to be algorithmically tuned to the same degree.
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