Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Google Gobbles Up You Tube

Google’s quest for wired (an unwired) world domination continued over the weekend, with the news of the massive computer portals purchase of the YouTube phenomenon.

The price of potential world domination checks in at 1.65 billion dollars in stock, the amount of the transaction that Google will put in the pockets of YouTube founders, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen , the pair who founded the on line video portal from a garage in California. As part of the deal the two will keep their jobs at the newly Google-ized YouTube, as will their staff.

The purchase brings yet another emerging form of communication under the Google umbrella, the ubiquitous search engine company earlier had purchased Blogger, the forum in which many of the world’s blogging community (including Podunk here) uses to post their thoughts into the World Wide Web. YouTube receives 65,000 new submissions daily and sends out an estimated 100 million clips of something a day, good, bad and truly horrid.

The founders posted their own giddy message on the YouTube site, which didn't exactly endear them to the world wide community of YouTube dwellers. Google itself was a little more reserved (neither kicking of heels, nor giggling for Google!) over their interpretation of the events of the day, with a business like blurb on their website hidden amongst other items in their Press Center.

The announcement from Chen and Hurley has not met with universal approval with some of the YouTubers, who probably are the early pioneers of the service back in the day when they were swapping their own mini cinematic masterpieces to a crowd of thousands rather than the millions of today.

Little did they know at the time, that their little act of social networking would make two guys in California very, very rich, in very little time.

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