If you only have one dimension available, things can get tiresome quickly. But maybe this coin has two sides. The creativity must not be limited. And that was exactly the idea when a couple of friends had something to discuss: Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. Hurley had studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and Chen and Karim studied computer science together at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
The inspiration for a new kind of video website obviously first came from Janet Jackson’s role in 2004 Super Bowl incident when her breast was exposed during her performance, and later from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Karim could not easily find video clips of either event online, which led to the idea of a video sharing site. Hurley and Chen said that the original idea was a video version of an online dating service, and had been influenced by the website Hot or Not. They created posts on Craigslist asking attractive women to upload videos of themselves to YouTube in exchange for a $100 reward. Difficulty in finding enough dating videos led to a change of plans, with the site’s founders deciding to accept uploads of any type of video.
Hurley and Chen developed the idea during the early months of 2005, after they had experienced difficulty sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party at Chen’s apartment in San Francisco.
The domain name www.youtube.com was activated on February 14, 2005, and the website was developed over the subsequent months. The first YouTube video, titled Me at the zoo, shows co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo. The video was uploaded on April 23, 2005.
You never know where things are going. But maybe it is worth adding a new location to this story. So there is a new department of the ASTROCOHORS CLUB:
starting with a simple visit at the zoo. Because the elephants, you know…
But…
What will you do, when they get you?
What will you do, when they break you?
If you continue, what will you… become?
Parts of this article contains information from the Wikipedia article “YouTube“. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply.