After the latest maintenance, YouTube came back with three new features. One of them is TestTube, a place where you can test the other new features, give feedback, and help them improve so they can get fully implemented into the site.

The first two TestTube babies are AudioSwap and Streams.

AudioSwap is quite an interesting feature; not so much from the usability point of view, but more as a distant sign of YouTube caving in to the lawsuits and copyright issues. AudioSwap enables users to exchange whatever music they’ve used for their video with a legal soundtrack; that is, music that YouTube has purchased rights for. Once you do it, the original music from the video is gone, so be careful. The choice of tracks is not huge, but it will be enough for most purposes. However, although from YouTube’s point of view the purpose is clear, why would users choose to do this is not entirely clear. I’ll simplify a little, but I see two options here. Either you care about the music you chose for your video, or you don’t care. If you don’t care, you won’t bother changing it. If you do care, then changing the track will probably ruin the video. As a result, I don’t see many users embracing this options - except if lawsuits start coming at their doors directly.

Streams is a feature aimed to satisfy users, not lawyers, and I predict it much greater popularity. Streams can be described as group video playlists + chatrooms. Users can add videos and chat about them, while moderators can remove videos if they’re off-topic or otherwise unsuitable. Video chat is a cool idea although the chat itself can sometimes get confusing and is mostly unrelated to the actual videos. But, I doubt anyone who has ever been in a chat room that expects some great level of coherence here. These kind of features are what YouTube has sorely missed so far and Streams really adds some flavor to the sometimes bland video browsing that has been the greater part of the YouTube experience.