YouTube had added a couple new things over the weekend. The more exciting feature is that you can now link to a starting point within a YouTube video. The other feature is that you can now customize the YouTube home page, based on your preferences.

TechCrunch described the feature as “deep linking” to specific points within the video. For example, if you want to skip to the portion of my last search video (I do them weekly), where I talk about the Google AdSense and Analytics integration, I just link to youtube.com/watch?v=OP1-5uxZffE#t=1m49s. Note, the #t=1m49s tells YouTube to start the video 1 minute and 49 seconds in.

The YouTube blog announced that users can login and customize the content on their home page. Plus, if you use YouTube Insights, you can add those modules to your home page as well.

Here is a screen capture of my customized home page, showing YouTube Insight charts first.

You can customize the number of videos shown within each section, as well as switch the layout between grid & list views. Plus you can add or remove content at the my homepage content section. The sections that can be added or removed include:

• Recommended for You
• Latest from Subscriptions
• Featured Videos
• Most Active Videos
• Friend Activity
• Insight Map
• Insight Chart
• Inbox
• About You (statistics)
• About Your Videos (statistics)

Related Topics: Channel: Video | Google: YouTube & Video

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz

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