A few new things

We took the site down tonight to do some maintenance and to push out a few new features. The new features are obviously more fun to talk about than the maintenance so here it goes:



Custom Channel URLS: Have you ever tried to tell people how to find you on youtube? "Go to youtube.com/profile? errrr...I think then you put user = or wait, is it user?...maybe just do a search." Well, now you can create your own customized channel url which will be simply youtube.com/name. Your custom URL can be your username or what ever name you want with a few exceptions - you can't pick someone else's username and you can't pick any words that would make your mother stick a bar of soap in your mouth.



My Account: We've been continuing to enhance the My Account page over the past couple of weeks. This is the one consolidated place for all your stuff - your account settings, inbox, channel information, videos, favorites and more. We also added a dropdown with some quick links to your most important things from the My Account link in the upper right hand corner.



Eye Candy: We're starting to pretty up some little things here and there on the site. Nothing too fancy, but you may notice new buttons in embeds and at the end of a video.



We also quietly launched a few new features that aren't quite ready for prime time. Come back in a few days to see what's been cooking.



One other thing, while the amount of spam I get to my email account steadily increases, I'd still like to get more feedback emails from all of you. I may not be able to respond to each and every email - but I really do read them all. Please continue to send me your thoughts, ideas and feedback, no matter how random or absurd, we want to hear it all.



Best,

Maryrose

The YouTube Team

More about → A few new things

Growing Pains

YouTube was down today from approximately 7AM to 1PM. There's really no enticing story to tell here, we weren't hacked and we weren't pushing new features. Simply put, our primary database crashed. We did make a very intentional decision to not immediately fail over to our redundant database but to instead bring up both databases simultaneously to ensure we had absolutely no data loss. Although we may have lengthened the time of our outage to do this, our number one priority was to not compromise our users' content in any way.



Our sincere apologies for any inconvenience the outage may have caused you. We can confidently say that the site is now completely restored and that we're working around the clock (literally, just ask our ops team) to ensure that this sort of thing does not happen in the future.



We will be taking a planned downtime this Thursday night to address some of the issues from today's outage as well push out some new features, so check back here in a few days for a more exciting update. 



Maryrose

The YouTube Team

More about → Growing Pains

Keeping it Real

Want to know what it's really like to work at YouTube? Check out this video of Chris (our head of BizDev no less) hunting down that stinky smell in the office.
The fun never ceases at YouTube! :)



For all my fellow animal lovers - we did NOT set up those horrible rat traps, they were left in our office by the old tenants. I'm personally quite fond of rats.



Maryrose

The YouTube Team

More about → Keeping it Real