We’ve been hearing all about this new YouTube homepage for months and months it seems. It’s been available to those who felt like taking the steps to get it early for a couple weeks.

Now, Google has officially launched it. Go to YouTube.com. The page feels much more personalized, and really places a great deal more emphasis on YouTube as a social entity – something I’ve been long surprised that Google hasn’t done more of.

It also comes with those new channels that have been in the news a number of times, as part of YouTube’s renewed focus on high quality video content.

“Given the homepage’s new focus on helping you find and organize your favorite Channels, we would be remiss if we didn’t update the look and feel of the Channels themselves,” the company says. “Today we’re launching an improved Channel design focused on what matters most: helping users find great videos. As different uploaders have different goals, we’ve created new Channel templates to meet your needs whether you produce one video a week or have thousands of videos for a fan to browse. Some partners have even uploaded videos talking about the features, or giving tips on how they’re taking advantage of the new design. To learn how to opt-in to and test this new Channel design, check out our help center.”

“To bring the new homepage and Channels designs together we’ve also applied a fresh coat of digital paint across the whole site,” Google adds. “In July, we unveiled an experimental design called Cosmic Panda. We’ve used your feedback to improve our overall design, and today, we’re presenting a cleaner and simpler YouTube, with a consistent gray background, bigger video thumbnails and a more streamlined watch page.”

Here’s a video highlighting the changes:

I wasn’t one of the ones that implemented the new interface early, but just browsing at it quickly, I can tell this is going to make the home page much more relevant on a personal basis, and is going to inspire people to subscribe to a lot more YouTube channels and gain exposure to more personally relevant video content.

Not to be overly dramatic, but this looks like what YouTube should have been a long time ago.