YouTube wins Time's 'Invention of the Year'

Post by **Roofus** » Mon Nov 06, 2006 7:49 pm

YouTube, the video-sharing Web site recently acquired by Google Inc. for $1.65 billion, 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 ? along with fame and embarrassment ? gets distributed over the Web.

YouTube, which had 27.6 million unique visitors in September, according to Nielsen NetRatings, came along at just the right time, according to Time: social-networking Web sites were hot, camcorders were cheap and do-it-yourself media was expanding beyond text-based blogs.

YouTube inherits the tiara from Snuppy, a cloned puppy and winner of the magazine's 2005 award.

Link

Skynet · Post by **Skynet** » Tue Nov 07, 2006 12:06 am

Eh I dunno, I think the one you bolded should have won.

ian · Post by **ian** » Tue Nov 07, 2006 12:22 am

i spend no time fucking...

i think youtube is more important

Skynet · Post by **Skynet** » Tue Nov 07, 2006 12:26 am

greay · Post by **greay** » Tue Nov 07, 2006 12:42 am

The vaccine is great & all, and it may even save thousands of lives, but it's nothing really novel. (Granted I don't know anything specific about it, so some of what I say may be wrong) If it was a cure for cancer in general, or even certain kinds of cancer, that'd be a big advancement. But this is simply a vaccine for a single disease. It's just the application of well-established techniques and practices to a different problem.

New vaccines are very important as medicine, but unless there's something remarkable about the manner in which they're produced, or in what they cure, they're not very important as inventions.

I'm not saying that YouTube necessarily should have won over it, but I can see why it didn't win.

Sir Savant · Post by **Sir Savant** » Tue Nov 07, 2006 7:21 pm

By the same argument, Youtube is just another website. And there is nothing truly remarkable about how it was produced. I honestly don't see how a website is an invention, but then again I don't sell millions of magazines per year.

greay · Post by **greay** » Tue Nov 07, 2006 8:24 pm

That's not the same argument at all. YouTube does a lot of stuff that your traditional website doesn't do. And it solves a troublesome problem that didn't have a good solution before it (and similar services) came about. Cross-platform video is a pain in the ass because video codecs and file formats are a terrible mess. YouTube allows people to upload videos and other people can watch them. They don't need to worry about any of the annoying details, because it works. Even if it fails in some circumstances (I've never had any problems with it), it's still leaps and bounds ahead of any desktop video player out there in this respect.

It's not the HTML that won the award. It's the infrastructure behind the site that allows people to easily share video over the internet. Nothing like that existed before. At least, nothing that was executed as well as YouTube was.

And seriously, what do you mean "nothing truly remarkable" about it? It lets me watch videos (not that I'd want to) that some obnoxious 14 year-old across the country decided was so awesome that he needed to share it with the world. If it weren't for YouTube, it would probably be in some form of WMV or some format I've never heard of before, that absolutely no video player on the Mac will play. Or if I'm lucky, some obscure format that I need to jump through all sorts of hoops installing codecs and whatnot to get it to play. And then when I'm finally able watch it, I wish I hadn't wasted all that time. At least with YouTube, the only time I have to waste is the time it takes to watch the video itself.

Ex-Cyber · Post by **Ex-Cyber** » Tue Nov 07, 2006 10:44 pm

greay wrote:If it weren't for YouTube, it would probably be in some form of WMV or some format I've never heard of before, that absolutely no video player on the Mac will play. Or if I'm lucky, some obscure format that I need to jump through all sorts of hoops installing codecs and whatnot to get it to play.

I may be giving YouTube too much credit, but I think it may actually be more likely that the person wouldn't have bothered to make the video in the first place for lack of an audience.

Calavera · Post by **Calavera** » Tue Nov 14, 2006 10:36 am

You all are missing the point. What about the shirt that simulates a hug? Now THAT should have won.