Google-owned
popular video sharing site YouTube has announced the addition of a new
functionality that will allow for further personalisation of user experience on
the platform. Following up on the opening last year in
different parts of the world of local sites tailored to specific national communities, YouTube has now separated language and locality so
that expatriates everywhere can be presented with content relevant to their
place of living using the language they are most comfortable with.
As the post
on the company's official blog justly remarks, ?Not all French speakers live in France?, and ?Japanese entertainment
extends far beyond Japan?.
The new feature aims to take the disconnect between idiom and culture
into account by allowing users to mix and match between 19 different local
content lenses and 15 languages, including Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish,
Russian, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Mandarin, thus delivering close to
300 custom combinations. These options
are available for selection at the top of the site?s presentation page, right
next to the YouTube logo.
A Japanese
businessman living in the United States and nursing a passion for
contemporary Finnish culture will feel that his needs are at last being taken
into account. The drive to ever more
thoroughly personalise user experience, however, should be understood in its
broader economic context as an effort to increase consumers? brand
identification as well as provide more accurate targeting for marketers, thus
maximising the value of promoting products and services on YouTube.