SnapHow.com : Web & Computing Tips - 2 New Tips

Enhance Youtube Viewing Experience with New Cosmic Panda Interface

Posted: 07 Jul 2011 01:10 PM PDT

After the cool Gmail redesign, Youtube added a new elegant looking user interface (under testing) called Cosmic Panda to to enhance your viewing experience on youtube. Some of the features you can see with "cosmic panda over the double rainbow":

New experience for watching videos and playlists
More page designs and better editing tools to customize your channel
Keep watching when moving between videos, playlists, and channels (Chrome only)
Stylish new look and feel

And I have decided to use it permanently as the default interface for youtube. With the dark background and different video sizes, modes watching videos got even better. See below…

Enhance Youtube Viewing Experience with New Cosmic Panda Interface

What I liked more is the Channel / Youtuber’s profile page. It now shows the total views, subscribers and 3 tabs giving you better navigation and access to the videos. (See below)

Enhance Youtube Viewing Experience with New Cosmic Panda Interface

Compared to the last ugly design of the site, this one is quite refreshing… I really liked it a lot and I recommend that you should check it out here.

► Go to youtube.com/cosmicpanda

and click the "Try it Out" button to test it.

Enhance Youtube Viewing Experience with New Cosmic Panda Interface

And if you don’t like it, you can switch back to the Classic version (for the time being). But, I would have also liked it a lot if youtube disabled auto-play on youtube videos and let uses press Play to watch a video.

Also read our tip on how to get link to play Youtube video from particular time and how to use Youtube Charts to find viral videos.

Find Updates from People’s Plus Stream: Google Realtime Alternative

Posted: 06 Jul 2011 09:06 AM PDT

Google Realtime Search, was once a very useful tool to find the latest tweets from users from the Google search interface. Personally, it helped me confirm breaking news, downtime of some popular sites etc. But it went down after soon after Google’s deal with Twitter for access to the public tweets/updates ended.

The realtime search option has disappeared from the search results sidebar, and the standalone google.com/realtime product returns a 404 error page ~via Mashable.

Although, Google is planning to implement the public stream of updates of people in Google+ into the realtime search, but that’s not until the public release of Google+ itself. But here is a temporary solution.

Search for Recent Updates from Google+ Stream, Facebook Status

Google actually indexes the status updates someone posts on his/ her Google+ public stream. It seems to me that it works with Facebook status updates as well. Use Google’s site specific search for the Past hour or Past 24 hours to see what people are talking about any topic of your choice.

(showing results from last 24 hours people talked about the scheduled NASA Launch)

Use site:facebook.com and site:plus.google.com with any search term, topic etc to updates from people about it. Click "Show search tools" to show results from specific time range like Past hour or Past 24 hours etc.

This is an useful solution for someone looking for an alternative to find latest updates from social media sites. Unfortunately, twitter doesn’t let Google index people’s tweets. Hence you can’t use this method to find "almost" real-time updates posted by people on their twitter timeline.

Also Read : Types of Popular Real Time Web Services Online