Brief History on YouTube

We are using You Tube to collect the information Videos for our
Bookshelf Topics. With the amazing growth of youtube over the
past few years, Heck the past few days,it has become more than
a “Funniest Home Video Site”

So If you were wondering what youtube is and how it came about,
Here Is a Brief History on YouTube

YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload,
view and share video clips. YouTube was created in mid-February
2005 by three former PayPal employees. The San Bruno-based
service uses Adobe Flash technology to display a wide variety
of video content, including movie clips, TV clips and music
videos, as well as amateur content such as videoblogging and
short original videos. In October 2006, Google Inc. announced
that it had reached a deal to acquire the company for US$1.65
billion in Google stock. The deal closed on November 13, 2006.

Unregistered users can watch most videos on the site, while
registered users are permitted to upload an unlimited number of
videos. Some videos are available only to users of age 18
or older (e.g. videos containing potentially offensive content).
The uploading of pornography or videos containing nudity is
prohibited. Related videos, determined by title and tags, appear
onscreen to the right of a given video. In YouTube's second year,
functions were added to enhance user ability to post video
'responses' and subscribe to content feeds.

Few statistics are publicly available regarding the number of
videos on YouTube. However, in July 2006, the company revealed
that more than 100 million videos were being watched every day,
and 2.5 billion videos were watched in June 2006. 50,000 videos
were being added per day in May 2006, and this increased to
65,000 by July.

In August 2006, The Wall Street Journal published an article
revealing that YouTube was hosting about 6.1 million videos
(requiring about 45 terabytes of storage space), and had
about 500,000 user accounts. As of January 15, 2008 , a YouTube
search for "*" returns about 65,000,000 videos (the asterisk is
a commonly used wildcard character in search engines,
therefore showing all videos)