YouTube introduces Moodwall

YouTube’s Moodwall. Image capped from The Guardian UK, bit.ly/QyaNck.

VIDEO-SHARING WEB site YouTube rolled out its Moodwall, a service that provides various emotion categories, available for U.S. users, Friday – 31 August 2012. With 20 emotion categories on its experimental release, it allows users a new way to express how videos they watch affect them.

The Moodwall has 20 emotions, which include varying emotions such as sad, funny, epic, etc. Based on user feedbacks, YouTube videos will be sorted into various categories, called Vibes, and placed on the experimental page so users will be able to select videos based on the categories they search.

The browse page has been converted into the new mood-driven format which contains a random grid of moods with thumbnail images. Clicking through a mood will show sub emotions associated which might be associated to certain videos. Once a video is selected, a playlist bar will be shown at screen’s bottom and these will be played continuously, unless a user selects another video from the queue.

This update on the social media giant is its attempt to improve on related video searches. This will also improve the user’s search results as the team’s latest study shows that users search contents in a general search term, i.e. “sad song,”  “happy music,” etc., which would return videos having these words in the title or description, instead of the emotion it conveys.