I was looking at my “recommended videos” on YouTube the other day, and guess which videos it recommended for me? Two Rick Astely songs, “Never Gonna Give You Up” aka “Rick Roll” and “Whenever You Need.”  Now I know I’ve been rick rolled a few times, but enough times for it to recommend similar, or in this case, the same, video to me?

Sorry for the bad quality of the screen cap, mspaint sucks at compressing GIFs.  Also what the hell is with the other three videos it recommended for me?

Today YouTube rolled out an update to their ever popular video player allowing embedded videos to be played in HD instead of having to click on a video and watch it on the YouTube site.   The new update adds a button between volume and fullscreen that is context sensitive to HD videos.  This also seems to fix the bug where videos would play incorrectly when swapped to HD.  The video below is an example of the new player. (Escape from City 17 by the Purchase Brothers.)

Each little update like this adds some chunk of functionality that feels as though it should have been there all along. Previous updates include widescreen, overlays, refined colors, etc. One more step on the way to Google taking over the world.