A (Very) Short History of YouTube

May 2nd, 2010

In a post last week on Mashable, Stan Schroeder reminds us that the first video uploaded to YouTube was on April 23, 2005. “The video is titled ‘Me at the zoo,’ he noted. “It was shot by Yakov Lapitsky and it’s only 19 seconds long, showing one of YouTube’s founders, Jawed Karim, at the San Diego Zoo.”

Could you feel the tension as Karim states: “…the whole thing about these guys is that they have really, really, REALLY,….um…long…(and here his hand motion seems intended to help him find the word — will it be something other than “trunks”?)…trunks…and that’s cool…”

Phew!

“The video doesn’t look like much,” Schroeder observes, “but it sparked a revolution; by July 2006, more than 65,000 videos were uploaded to the site every day. In October that same year Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion — a reminder of how fast things move in the age of the Internet.”