YouTube scoops top invention award
YouTube beat out a vaccine that prevents a cancer-causing sexually transmitted disease and a shirt that simulates a hug to grab top honors as Time magazine's "Invention of the Year for 2006".
Time magazine, owned by media conglomerate Time Warner Inc., wrote in an article that YouTube's scale and sudden popularity have changed the rules about how information.
...only YouTube created a new way for millions of people to entertain, educate, shock, rock and grok one another on a scale we've never seen before. That's why it's Time's Invention of the Year for 2006.
But if YouTube is the Invention of the Year, who exactly invented it?
Let's be clear: we know who started it. That would be three twentysomething guys named Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim. At a Silicon Valley dinner party one night in 2004 they started talking about how easy it was to share photos with your friends online but what a pain it was to do the same thing with video.
So they did something about it. They hacked together a simple routine for taking videos in any format and making them play in pretty much any Web browser on any computer. Then they built a kind of virtual video village, a website where people could post their own videos and watch and rate and comment on and search for and tag other people's videos. Voilˆ: YouTube.
But even though they built it, they didn't really understand it. They thought they'd built a useful tool for people to share their travel videos. They thought people might use it to pitch auction items on eBay. They had no idea. They had opened a portal into another dimension.
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