Do You Tube?

YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload and view videos. YouTube was created in 2005 by three former PayPal employees. [Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim] In the next year Google Inc. purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion. This subsidiary of Google is based in San Bruno, California.

YouTube began primarily by an $11.5 million investment by Sequoia Capital. The initial headquarters were located above a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California. The domain name of ‘www.youtube.come’ was activated on Valentine’s Day in 2005.

YouTube uses Adobe Flash Video technology to display the videos. The wide variety of videos seen on YouTube include; movie clips, music videos, video blogging and of course user-generated content videos.

The VERY FIRST YouTube video was uploaded on April 23, 2005 entitled Me At the Zoo. It is simply a video of founder, Jawed Karim, at the San Diego Zoo.

There was a slight controversy with the website name ‘youtube’. The owner of the site, www.utube.come filed a lawsuit against YouTube in November 2006. UTube (Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment) of course lost the lawsuit and resulted in the change of its website to www.utubeonline.com

YouTube has made it possible for anyone with an Internet connection to post a video world wide that can be seen within minutes. YouTube also made it possible for everyday people to gain a celebrity status from doing a six minute dance routine, to charlie biting your finger.

Released on YouTube on May 23, 2008 was the band, Weezer’s music video for their single titled, Pork and Beans. The video itself is a video of YouTube videos. According to director, Mathew Cullen, “the video was to be a celebration of creativity.” Numerous famous YouTube videos were featured in the music video. The list goes from One Man Band, Numa Numa, Dramatic Gopher, Afro Ninja, Diet Coke and Mentos Experiment, Chris Croker, Miss Teen USA, Crank that Solja Boy, Evolution of Dance and many, many more. The YouTube Celebrities who were featured in the video were flown to Los Angeles to work with the band in the making of the video.

Entertainment Weekly put it best when they put YouTube on its end-of-the-decade “best of” list saying...

“Providing a safe home for piano playing cats, celeb goof-ups and overzealous lip-synchers since 2005.”