Release notes: Facebook Connect, real-time sharing, subscriber stats

In addition to some changes to our new video page, which we reported in a separate post, here are some things that have launched recently:

Invitation to Facebook Connect: You've been able to connect your YouTube account to your Facebook account for a while now in order to AutoShare or to find friends to subscribe to. Less known is that the YouTube homepage can show you the YouTube videos your friends are sharing on Facebook; we've kept this under the radar while we've ramped up support. But now, when you log in to your YouTube account, you'll get a prominent invitation in the Recent Activity module (see below) to connect to Facebook, which we highly recommend that you do. In fact, we hope to integrate more social networks with YouTube going forward: knowing which videos your friends are sharing on social platforms is one of the best ways to discover those clips that you, in turn, just might feel compelled to pass along. That's how we found this gem, a lovely virtual choir.

Real-time sharing: AutoShare lets you effortlessly share videos from YouTube to Twitter, Facebook or Google Reader. What you might not have known is that until recently, it took about 10 minutes for those items to get pushed out from YouTube to these platforms. Now these actions happen instantly, in real time.

Partner Program expands again: Exciting! Users in Israel and Mexico can now become members of the YouTube Partner Program (YPP). To sign up, click here.

Subscribers tab in Insight: The number of subscribers you have is an important metric for many YouTube users, as it indicates how many people love your videos so much that they want to be sure never to miss one. (Speaking of which, we commend Nigahiga, who recently hit 2 million subscribers to become YouTube's No. 1 most subscribed channel of all time. But, we digress.) Insight, YouTube's analytics tool, recently added data about the evolution of your subscriber numbers over time, broken down into new subscriptions and unsubscriptions per day. Head over to your account's Insight area to check it out.

Planning our April Fool's Day joke: What joke? :) We just wanted to see if you were reading this far.

The YouTube Team