YouTube is Time's
invention of year
BY BILL HUTCHINSON
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Monday, November 6th, 2006
The breakthrough that turns home movies into Internet blockbusters is Time magazine's Invention of the Year.
YouTube, which sparked a revolution by allowing Joe Schmoes everywhere to get their 15 nanoseconds of Web fame, beat out a supereconomical car and a soldier-saving robot for the eye-opening honor.
"Only YouTube created a new way for millions of people to entertain, educate, shock, rock and grok one another on a scale we've never seen before," Time's editors wrote in the issue hitting newsstands this week.
"The rules are different now, and one Web site changed them: YouTube."
The computer innovation is the brainchild of Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, who went from Silicon Valley geeks to ultrarich geniuses when they sold YouTube to Google for $1.65 billion.
But the magazine contends the trio's creation would have been lost in cyberspace if not for the would-be filmmakers, singers, science-project enthusiasts and amateur daredevils uploading 70,000 new videos a day on YouTube.
It's also become the place to go for the latest "gotcha" videos of imploding politicians.
"They had no idea. They had opened a portal into another dimension," the magazine wrote of Chen, Hurley and Karim - who came up with the way of taking videos in any format and making them play on nearly any computer's Web browser.
Other notable inventions on Time's list of 50 best include:
