YouTube just came back online after scheduled maintenance - and it sports some new features. The biggest change is the introduction of customized URLs - just like MySpace, you can create a clean URL like www.youtube.com/mashable, rather than youtube.com/profile?user=mashable. But the URL doesn’t have to be related to your username at all.
I wondered if this would lead to hundreds of users grabbing the usernames of popular YouTube users - you could, for instance, grab youtube.com/lonelygirl15 (a popular member) and siphon off some traffic. However, they’ve limited the risk of username squatting by only providing the feature to users who have been registered for a week, have at least one video uploaded and who have a confirmed email address. What’s not clear is whether established users could still try this tactic - probably best to grab your URL ASAP.
Other minor changes include a drop-down menu for your account settings, and a redesign of the menu that appears after the video has finished. Finally, there’s a new play button on videos posted to external sites. This is one YouTube outage that was worth the downtime.
