It’s a shame that YouTube was actually launched last year, otherwise this award would have meant something.
Jokes aside, the venerable Time magazine (who Time recently decided not to invest in at the expense of SI and CNN, mind you) came out and honored the company founded by Jawed Karim, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen as the invention of the year and small details like it not being invented this year notwithstanding, it’s a much-deserved award (and reward) for a company that caught the Web off guard and stole the limelight away from Google (of course we know who got the last laugh when it was acquired by Google… hmm, actually, exactly who did?).
Of course, I’m not sure that the fickle folks on the blogosphere would consider YouTube to be an “invention”… and while the same crowd on blogs helped propel YouTube to the stratosphere, the truth is that the proverbial judges are not those on blogs, but rather, the people in the larger mainstream world who became familiar with online video thanks to YouTube.
For that, despite all of the knocks, YouTube deserves all of the credit in the world.
It’s worth noting of course that YouTube is in fact what Flickr was to photos, and if Yahoo! had not been shellshocked into not tweaking Flickr (after initially encouraging Flickr users to sign in through Yahoo’s sign in page and not Flickr and putting up with Flickr’s users’ revolt), Yahoo! would have “probably” encouraged Flickr to morph into a video sharing site.
Of course, hindsight is always 20/20. But speaking of hindsight, it is simply unbelievable that YouTube was not really an invention at all (I am giving them props in that statement).
It borrowed from:
- Tagging and media sharing: Flickr and Del.ico.us (both bought by Yahoo!)
- Online video: Metacafe, others.
- Consumer generated media: pick ‘em
But, at least, YouTube invented the video playing technology. Hold on, someone is handing me a note.
Oh, that’s right. The video technology is actually Macromedia’s flash.
They did do one thing that was “inventive”: syndication. Though I’m certainly not the first one who called that.
All right, if Time magazine had honored YouTube in its online edition, it could always go back and change the honor from best invention to best mashup… but too bad the folks at Time decided not to invest in Time and the magazine is on newsstands already.
Which, I guess means that few people will notice.
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November 7th, 2006 at 9:49 pm
[…] You also have a phenomenal track record at acquisitions and wooing young entrepreneurs and these are all things that Yahoo! could use. After all, Yahoo! bought both Del.icio.us and Flickr yet YouTube is now in Google’s hands. To see why that makes sense, click here. […]
November 8th, 2006 at 10:30 am
[…] This is an interesting point, because I see many VCs funding companies who provide a platform to add social networking capabilities to any site. On the surface it seems like a good idea, but eventually, where’s the differentiation factor? Of course, I could very well be wrong on this: the most successful social networking company of late: YouTube, did not invent any thing new, it simply repackaged elements that were already popular. For more on that, click here. […]