YouTube wants to be social. That’s why the site has an all-new look that’s highly centered on social media. In fact, the site now resembles a social media site, which is the look that YouTube seemingly wanted to achieve. If you use YouTube at all, you’ll note the changes right away. If you’re a casual user, you’ll want to know about the new look too – just in case you happen to stumble upon YouTube in the near future.

Thankfully, YouTube has made the new interface user-friendly, which is something that many sites doesn’t get right off the bat. Navigating the new website is really just a matter of heading to the site and following the tutorial, but I’ll walk you through it here first just in case you get lost along the way. Aside from the various new changes, it’s important to point out that YouTube was due for a new look, and this site may become popular once again thanks to the facelift.

What’s New

The first thing you’ll notice is a new activity feed – see, I told you YouTube wants to be social! If a new video has been created, you’ll see that video right away via the news feed. Clicking on that video will bring you to the video. It is also possible now to customize a homepage through YouTube.

If you happen to stumble upon a video creator who you think is great, you can subscribe to this person’s news feed. Much like social networks, you will never be in the dark when videos you want to see pop up. You can browse through a number of different “channels” (categories) in order to find channels that you might find interesting. These channels can then be added to your homepage.

After subscribing to the new channels, you can hit the home page icon to return to your home page. As you can tell, the new YouTube is a lot more personalized than it used to be. When you want to find videos quickly and effortlessly, all you really have to do is add a channel or video to your home feed. From there, you can link any video to your Facebook or Google Plus account.

Interestingly, YouTube has chosen to pit Facebook and G+ against one another by placing each site’s respective buttons directly below a news feed. If you have both G+ and Facebook accounts, you can easily connect any video to these accounts. Not only can you share a video via Google Plus and Facebook, but you can also see what your friends are viewing thanks to this new interface.

Force Feeding Google

Google has always stated, since the inception of Google Plus, that it intends to make G+ a very large part of all Google products. Apparently, YouTube (owned by Google) is no exception to this rule. Even though Google has included a Facebook link for videos, that annoying G+ icon is still there. In this reviewer’s opinion, Google hasn’t successfully managed to keep Google Plus users, so now the company is forcing the Google Plus brand on people who use all Google products. For obvious reasons, this tactic may not gain a lot of votes.

Yet, to be fair, YouTube is owned by Google, so it makes sense that Google would rely on G+ buttons. Sadly, Google owns many different products that are used regularly around the world. This means that you can expect to see a lot more Google Plus products popping up near you very soon.