Another Social Networking Site That You Are Allowed To Post Videos

Social networking has become the thing to do. Everyone who is anyone has some form of a profile on a social networking site. You Tube teamed up with Twitter in March of 2009. Below every video on You Tube, you can click on the "share" link. Three options will show up, Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter.  If you click on to the Twitter button, than a pop-up window takes you to your Twitter account and fills in a tweet telling your followers to "check out this video", it also shows the title of the video and the URL. One person said they like this because there are some videos that they would like to share but not with a certain crowd. Twitter is a better place to post a variety of videos that will not offend your friends. With all the videos that go around on facebook, it is nice to know that you can share your favorite video on  Twitter also.

Interesting Tidbits

Access to You Tube has been blocked by several countries because they felt the content was offensive. Several countries blocked the site temporarily including Morocco, Thailand, Iran, Pakistan, and The People's Republic of China. Some schools have blocked access, citing not being able to determine what sort of video material might be accessed by students. Countries that currently have the site blocked are Turkey and Libya. Pakistan blocked the site again in May 2010 for sacrilegious content.  All Videos have to be under 15 minutes. It used to be 10 minutes but in July 2010 it was increased to 15 minutes. The file size cannot be more than 2GB. One of the key features that the site offers is that users can view the sites videos on web pages outside of the site. The videos can be embedded as well as ranking and commenting. The owner of the video can disable all three if they want to.

Criticism

You Tube has been criticized for not making sure that its videos respect the copyright laws. The site has a message that clearly tells the person uploading the video not to upload any TV shows, music videos, commercials, etc without permission. Many unauthorized clips still make it on the site. You Tube does not view videos before they are posted online, this is left to the copyright holders to issue a take down notice. Copywriters feel that the site is too lax on controlling unauthorized videos and have tried to sue the site several times. The site has also received criticism over offensive content in some of the videos. Criminal conduct, defamation, and pornography are prohibited by the site. You Tube relies on its users to flag the inappropriate content and a site employee will view it to see whether it violated the sites terms of service.  The site feels that this is the best way to handle any problems since so many videos are being uploaded daily.

How You Tube Got Started

Chad Hurley was on of the first 20 people hired to start up PayPal. He designed their company logo which is still used today. Steve Chen was also one of the small group of new hires. Max Levchin, a co founder of PayPal, convinced Chen to quit school with only two semesters to graduate and be an engineer for the site. Jawed Karim dropped out of school his junior year of college to be an engineer with the site also. The three helped develop the site and became millionaires in their 20s after PayPal was sold. The three were not ready to retire so they brainstormed to try to come up with another company they could start up. The first idea was for the new business to be a video dating service. People would upload  videos of themselves. The site was going to be called Tune In Hook Up. After a few weeks they realized this was to limited and they went back to brainstorming. They came up with the idea to upload short video clips for people to watch. They made it very easy to upload and people could upload anything that struck their fancy. They called the site You Tube. The site caught on quickly and outpaced other similar sites.