Major YouTube redesign launches to all

YouTube has received a significant redesign, it’s largest in history, to help users discover more content. With 48 hours of content uploaded each minute, this round of changes seeks to bring more of that to users attention.

The main goal of the redesign is to make YouTube more of a destination, turning the homepage into a place that people visit to find new stuff and making channels more analogous to real TV channels.

It is also another subtle integration of Google+. Now, the same log-in works for Gmail, Google+, YouTube and other Google products. People can choose videos posted by their friends on Google+ as a channel and can share videos by giving them a +1 and start hang-outs directly from YouTube. Official announcement here.

Facebook Insights now includes sentiment analysis

Within the latest changes introduced to Insights on Facebook, we spotted that you can now monitor not only positive but negative feedback too. What does Facebook classify as negative? The posts which were either hidden in a person’s news feed or personally gave it negative feedback in their news feed.

This looks to be a step in the right direction from Facebook to provide a richer and fuller picture and gives us a sneak preview in to where they are taking their analytics package next whilst also providing brand owners with a new metric to keep track of.

Google+ to allow multiple admin users of brand pages before 2012

Kristoffer Sorensen held a Q&A recently, on Google+ of course about feature requests from users and how far along they are in becoming available. One of the most frequently asked questions is when we will be able to to have multiple users being admin of a brand page on Google+. This is scheduled to be available this month (December) and will make Google+ a more viable proposition and platform for brands wanting to create a closer relationship with their customers.

A few other things that are coming soon: Analytics (this will no doubt have a much stronger feature set than that of Insights for Facebook), scheduling and auto-posting content, the ability to manage brand pages from mobile devices and event integration. It’s clear that Google+ shouldn’t be written off just yet.

The 20 best connected cities in Europe

In research by NetIndex, the 20 best connected cities in Europe were discovered. It became apparent that when it comes to super fast internet, Eastern Europe reigns supreme. It may come as a surprise that Vilnius, Lithuania is the city with the world’s fastest download speed at over 30MB per second. This is in contrast with the global average over 9MB per second. Cities in Bulgaria, Romania and Latvia follow closely behind and the remaining cities can be found over on BusinessInsider.

Summing up 2011. What were the top searches on Bing? [Video]

According to Bing searches, 2011 was the year of musical superstars, continued celebrity fascination, concern for human tragedy and new royalty. From rising stars and weddings to intense trials and natural disasters, Bing has captured history through the searches that mark the year’s most important people, places and moments in time in a short video here.

For those insanely curious, Justin Bieber was the most searched person, followed by Kim Kardashian and Jennifer Aniston.

Mobile social networking on the increase

Recent research from comScore has shown that mobile social networking in Europe’s five largest markets grew 44% in the last year. Jeremy Copp, EVP for mobile says that this growth has been “driven largely by the growth in smartphone adoption, making it easier than ever for users to stay connected and engage in social activities while on-the-go”.

Almost 50% of this audience access social networking sites daily, and Facebook remains the most popular site, with an average monthly audience of 39m mobile users in Europe during September.

Tablets fuel mobile commerce growth

iPads now account for 31% of all mobile traffic but the iPhone is still the most popular generator of mobile sales, according to the research although total sales generated by iPhone users declined in share during the third quarter to 50%, compared to 60% 12 months earlier as market share was cannibalised by the iPad.

Mobile traffic accounted for an average of 10.92% in Q3 2011, compared to 4% 12 months earlier. This equates to a 173% year-on-year increase in traffic, according to the research.

Persil is looking to find a brand ambassador on Facebook

Unilever are inviting their Facebook VIP club members to choose who they think should be the next ‘stain ambassador’ who will reinforce the brand’s messaging of ‘getting dirty can be fun’. This is one of several ideas Unilever is crowdsourcing the content for through its VIP app on the platform.

Michael Litman is the Head of Engagement at 90:10 Group and Editor of SocialMediaCouncil.eu. You can follow him on Twitter and Google+.