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YouTube Testing Moodwall for Content Discovery

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Mon, 2012-09-03 22:22 — Arenold
According to The Verge, Google's YouTube recently began testing a new content discovery feature allowing users access to a "Moodwall" where videos are organized into collections by vibe.

From the user's perspective, this new feature seems to be built to facilitate a common usage for YouTube, which is to search and browse short entertaining videos. By accessing the Moodwall, YouTube users can now find videos organized into collections with the vibe of the video as the relevant property for organizing the videos in the collection. This new feature is an alternative to the normal "browse videos" feature, where recommendations are made based on a user's viewing history (if logged in) or a user can select a category of video. For example, if a user visits YouTube and would like to browse videos, the user has the alternative to browse videos by a specified vibe. This feature is also an extension of "Channels" on YouTube, where users such as NBC can have a channel for YouTube users to watch their content. The Moodwall video collections are in essence YouTube's own channels. A notable parallel is that YouTube channels or even television channels typically have unique vibes or characteristics which attract viewers, such as Comedy Central. Collections of videos organized by vibe such as Funny could be considered a parallel to television channels like Comedy Central.

From an Organizing Systems perspective, YouTube likely calls upon Google's expertise in building search algorithms to create these curated collections of videos. The "vibe" of video is a subjective property and therefore YouTube must find an algorithm to create the vibe property for a given video. Without YouTube specifically stating which resource properties are used to determine the vibe of a video it is difficult to know the exact algorithm which creates this property. Likely resource properties could include: the uploader category, the number of views, videos viewed before and after the video, the content of comments, the common search terms leading users to the video, and potentially the assistance of a human agent (ie YouTube staff) among hundreds of potential variables. Considering the creation of a vibe property for YouTube's video resources and the number of resource properties which could contribute to this process highlights the potential for using the massive amounts of electronic data (proprietary, web, user generated) to create new and novel Organizing Systems to facilitate interactions with resources.