Something new to play with : Youtube Infocards!

Well, that was a nice surprise when I went to the antique annotation editor of Youtube today, which in my opinion by the way, needs a major overhaul. In fact I had forgotten to "fill the annotations in the outro of the recent video with life". Well, fortunately, just 26 people watched the video so far and yet nobody complained ;). Well, and now there was this notice, which said that so-called information cards are available from now on. WTF? I had no clue what it was all about first and went on a Google recherche. Then my old skull had figured out what it is and what it is good for. Anyone who wants to know more, can read all about it on the official documentation page.
 

The infocards are behind this little icon. A left mouse click and they are shown.

My impression? My Opinion? Caveat: The implementation could in my opinion be improved a bit. Especially that one can not freely determine the vertical order of the information cards. In the screenshots shown below you can see that I added an infocard for the playlist of the "Frühling auf Madeira" series (to which this Video belongs) and for a link to the alionsonny album "Reggae?". So far I have not found a way to change the vertical order. But maybe this is in the next update ;). The editor for the infocards is definitely much more intuitive and useful than the uglyness, called the annotation editor.

Here you see 2 infocards: One is of type Playlist and links to the videos playlist and one is of type Merchandise and links to the music album. In total you can put 5 infocards in a single video.

The benefits of this new feature? Well, there will be for sure different opinions about this, but I think it's a nice way, for example, to link to the corresponding playlist from which a video is. Any Youtuber, who wanted to accomplish this before, had to use annotations, which most of the time received mixed response from the audience. I also find the option beautiful, to have the possibility to add merchandising links with minimal effort and minimal impact on the viewer experience, such as the link to the music album. And all that using just that small (i) that even disappears if you do not move the mouse cursor across the video window.

Conclusion: I think this is great! For me it is a welcome opportunity to achieve such things without flooding the video window with annotations. In my opinion, this feature is the best thing the Youtube developers have managed to get done in a long time. Keep it up!