The Connections Project

YouTube

YouTube is owned by Google. Google bought the website for considerably more than most analysts valued it at. Videos from YouTube are integrated directly into Google's flagship search engine, where they often enjoy positions near the top of the search results page. YouTube is the source of some of Google's biggest legal woes, as old-fashioned media conglomerates desperately try to cling to a bygone, pre-YouTube world.

While Google proper is a search engine which focuses on searching the entire internet, YouTube provides a specialty search engine of its own which searches its own video archives, which do constitute a large majority of all the video content of the internet.

One of the innovations of YouTube was the ability to embed videos on outside websites, and Facebook utilizes this very well, automatically embedding videos when they are mentioned in status updates and private messages and so on.

Facebook and YouTube have very different purposes, the former is a social networking site while the latter revolves around uploading and sharing videos.

YouTube is a Web 2.0 website and that whole concept was pioneered in Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, basically invented the whole concept of letting users dynamically create and edit their own content, which concept lies at the heart of YouTube. The difference is that at Wikipedia, editors create content which is mostly text-based and strives for an encyclopedic flavor, while YouTube editors create primarily video-based content with very little restriction.

When YouTube was making its debut into the world, a lot of its rapid growth was spurred on by bloggers who took advantage of YouTube's innovative feature where it allows videos to be embedded off-site. In this way YouTube continues to provide lots of shiny eye-catching glitz to the bloggers (whether at Blogger itself or indeed any of the blogging platforms).