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If you’ve ever been to a Red Sox game in Fenway park, you are very likely to hear the fans chanting, “Yankees Suck” at some point during the game. It often doesn’t matter if we’re playing against the Twins, the Jays, the Rays or the NY Chokers themselves, you have a very good chance of hearing this unofficial Beantown mantra.

So, upon seeing the Yankees die in the first round again, I was quite inspired to write (and record) a song.  After getting positive feedback from friends and a few local radio stations, I decided to post it up on YouTube and share it with other Sox fans.

After my video was up and running the votes and comments started to trickle in. That’s when I noticed a link that says, “Try out the NEW (beta) version of this page!”

…click.  Oh okay!

The first change is to the video details and a greater emphasis on the author who created and posted the video.  In the old version, it has a button that says “subscribe”. The problem is that it’s difficult to see what you are actually subscribing to, so they fixed this bad UI, by putting the user’s name again in tiny print under the button. In the new Beta version, the authors name is much larger and the subscribe buttons are both in a separate box which allows the user to see who they are subscribing to.

In the old version they had a 3-tab section for containing “Related videos”, “More from this User” and “Playlists”. In the new version, they are stacked on top of each other.  I found this to be more effective because the user can see everything at once or they could expand or collapse them quite easily.

Another change is a 2nd column on the far right of the screen that offers yet another list of promoted videos, which made the old design look cluttered and messy. The new beta version is cleaner because the promoted videos are at the bottom of the stack and the user can see them pretty easily… especially if there is a string of several comments to scroll through.

Lastly, the rating aspect under the main video has been simplified with larger icons in the new beta design, which leaves more room for the embed code.  I like that they have moved the embed code to this location. Before it used to be under the author’s name which didn’t make sense to me.

In the new Design, you will find the following benefits:
-    Everything pertaining to the user  (subscribe, bio, edit features) is all in one place.
-    Everything for the video is under the video (share, favorite, ratings and embed code)
-    Cleaner overall, does not require as many tiny-font helper text

Good job YouTube (powered by Google)

Originally posted on WeAreSmarter.org. Myles is a guest blogger for the WeAreSmarter project.

Business networking and Social Media leader, LinkedIn added a long-awaited feature where you can add a photo to your LinkedIn profile. It offers the general browse/upload functionality, but one of the coolest features is the ability to resize and crop the photo before loading it into your profile. It also allows you to select who gets to see your photo. The choices are: Everyone, My Network, My Connections, or No one.

My question is: If you select “No one”, and it won’t be visible to anyone except for yourself, then why would you load a photo in the first place? I’m not sure what the thinking would be behind a setting like this. Over all, I love this feature.

The only challenge I had was taking a photo of myself that I could be happy with. Should I wear a suit and neck tie to look more like the President-elect of the AMA? Or maybe I should wear some Redsox swag to show my support for the home team? Well, in the end, I just went with whatever I was wearing at the time… a t-shirt and a hat with the owl from the tootsie-roll pop commercial on the front. Sometimes the best costume is the one that fits.

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