YouTube is rolling out new features for their partners enabling them to use a new form of annotations. Previously, I felt that the annotations feature was a bit limited. It was designed to keep viewers on YouTube.com by only allowing video owners to link to other YouTube videos and no external sites. With this enhanced annotations feature, you can now link to sites outside of YouTube.com. This is great for promoting products or content. This joins other features for partners such as enhanced page layouts, custom thumbnails, unlimited length videos and more. Google is really starting to roll out some great features for YouTube which has really lacked the bells and whistles of many other platforms. These features are being rolled out in typically Google fashion, so partners will need to be patient.

Here’s a great article on ClickZ.com about the new features.