Tag: YouTube Instant

YouTube Instant Gets A Million Visitors in 10 Days, Creator Accepts YouTube job

Feross Aboukhadijeh, a Facebook intern and student at Stanford, launched YouTube Instant, just after Google rolled out Google Instant. It quickly became a viral hit. If you’re not familiar, read here. We received an email from Aboukhadijeh early this morning.

"Good news!" Aboukhadijeh tells WebProNews. "YouTube Instant hit one million visitors and I will be accepting the job offer at YouTube!"

He also tells us that for the time being, he’ll be keeping YouTube Instant (as opposed to it becoming property of Google).

"YouTube Instant hit one million visitors on Monday, just 10 days since I launched it!" he adds. "The site also has 28,000 Facebook Likes, 20,000 Tweets, and 14,000 Stumbles – quite impressive numbers for only two weeks since launch! (I’ve been busy with the first week of classes at Stanford, so I didn’t announce this until now.)"

"YouTube Instant has been on the homepage of CNN, Fox News, VentureBeat, CNET, Hacker News, All Things D, Engadget, PC Magazine, and WebProNews — of course!" he says. "The site went viral on a scale that I never could have predicted."

"Also noteworthy: I just updated the site with some awesome new features: autoplay, keyboard controls, shareable URLs, and a sexy new design. And I’m not going to stop there. I’m currently working on adding awesome Facebook integration, on-the-fly playlist creation, and custom auto-updating AdSense units."

YouTube Instant has gotten a lot of exposure all over the world. Only 40% of its traffic is from the United States. Feross talks more about it here.

September 24, 2010
YouTube Instant Creator Worked on Secret Facebook Project

YouTube Instant creator Feross Aboukhadijeh tells WebProNews he can’t talk about his work at Facebook, because it’s related to a project that is "still secret".

YouTube Instant has seen 715,000 visitors in six days. We talked a bit the other day about the "viral whirlwind" that the site created. We exchanged some words with Aboukhadijeh, and he doesn’t really know how it happened. But boy, did it happen.

Aboukhadijeh, a student at Stanford University and an intern at Facebook was almost immediately offered a job by YouTube CEO Chad Hurley over Twitter. This led to Aboukhadijeh going to YouTube HQ to talk to Hurley.

Based on comments made on his blog and on Twitter, it looked like he basically had the job. " I look forward to supporting and improving YouTube Instant in the future," he wrote. "I hope to see it become a core part of the YouTube.com experience!"

He also tweeted, "@Chad_Hurley I had fun at YouTube HQ today. Looking forward to seeing what we can do with YouTube Instant!"

Aboukhadijeh told WebProNews, however, "I haven’t actually accepted the YouTube offer yet. We’re still figuring out how this is all going to work out, and nothing’s final yet. However, Chad and the engineers I spoke with were excited about the possibilities."

Even still, as he watches the pageviews roll in, the buzz that YouTube Instant has generated still seems to be a bit of a mystery to him. "Not sure how it blew up so quickly. All I did was update my Facebook status. And it spread from there. Pretty crazy, huh?"

If the story portrayed in the book "The Accidental Billionaires" (the basis for the upcoming film, The Social Network) is accurate, Facebook itself grew in a similar fashion as Mark Zuckerberg sent a few friends his project. YouTube Instant isn’t likely to blow up to the level of Facebook, but it could get pretty big if it does indeed become integrated with YouTube itself.

"I think after things cool down a bit, I should carefully consider how exactly YouTube Instant went viral and write up a blog post to share my thoughts about it all," Aboukhadijeh tells us.

"People really seem to be enjoying the site and it’s a huge hit," he says.

We’ll be looking forward to that post, and to see what direction his career takes as a result of the whole thing. It’s just an interesting story.

He’s been working with one of Google’s competitors, but that is about to end. Google might be interested in that, as well. "I work at Facebook right now. I’m a software engineer intern. My internship ends at the end of the week since classes at Stanford resume. I can’t talk about the project I worked on at Facebook – it’s still secret."

September 16, 2010
The Viral Whirlwind of YouTube Instant

YouTube Instant, a site created by Facebook Intern Feross Aboukhadijeh caught the attention of YouTube CEO Chad Hurley, as we reported the other day. Hurley even offered Aboukhadijeh a job over Twitter.

What’s really amazing, however, is how much attention Aboukhadijeh has generated about YouTube Instant. This is today’s viral Internet in action, in a display you just couldn’t have seen in the pre-Twitter era. Last night, Feross tweeted that YouTube Instant had received 270,000 visitors in 3 days.

It’s been the subject of somewhere in the ballpark of 375 tweets just in the past three hours leading up to this writing, and it’s received this kind of Twitter love consistently since it launched.

None of this is to say that Twitter is the only reason YouTube Instant has become a viral hit, though there’s no doubt Twitter has played a crucial role. YouTube Instant made Google Trends over the weekend, and its received a fair amount of media coverage. Aboukhadijeh has a list of publications who have covered YouTube Instant, which includes WebProNews, TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, Fast Company, Engadget, and even big mainstream publications like the New York Times and Washington Post.

It’s interesting to see the nature of the viral web in action and how social media and blogs/news publications feed each other. Enough tweets, and it must be storyworthy. Enough stories written about it, and it must be tweetworthy.

It’s funny to think that the whole thing started from a bet between roommates and 3 hours of work. "It started out as a bet with my roommate, Jake Becker. I bet him I could build real-time YouTube search in less than an hour," says Aboukhadijeh on his blog. "Sadly, I lost the bet – It took me 3 hours to finish it, and another couple hours to polish the user interface into what you see now at YTInstant.com. But, I’m happy with the result."

Clearly a lot of other people are happy with it too.

"Needless to say, YouTube Instant has gone viral," says Aboukhadijeh. "Without pausing to worry about what caused this magical event to transpire, I set about upgrading my under-powered server to a much beefier configuration capable of handling the Slashdot effect. For most of Friday morning, my server was visibly struggling to serve the flood of web traffic."

As for YouTube Instant itself, he says he’s working to make it more full featured. It’s unclear whether or not he’ll actually be working for Google (we’re waiting for a response about that), but he’s no doubt doing plenty to drive YouTube views.

September 13, 2010
“YouTube Instant” Creator May Soon Be Working for Google

Update: Peter Kafka at All Things Digital reports that Feross is already working as an intern at Facebook. That’s interesting, considering the growing competition between these two companies.

Original Article: Google Instant created a lot of buzz this past week, both negative and positive. It also created some inspiration. Feross Aboutkhadijeh, a computer science student at Stanford, created his own little "YouTube Instant", and attracted a lot of attention because of it.

He just so happened to catch Google’s attention, and YouTube CEO Chad Hurley has offered him a job via Twitter (hat tip to Ben Parr at Mashable).

Hurley tweeted, "Hey @FreeTheFeross! Loving YouTube Instant…want a job? ;)"

Feross responded, "Hey @Chad_Hurley. Glad you liked YouTube Instant! Is that a for-real job offer ;)"

Despite all the winking, it looks like it may have been a real offer. Hurley then responded, "@FreeTheFeross Are you read to leave school? 🙂 I’ll send you a DM.

It will be interesting to see what materializes from this. Google could no doubt implement Google Instant functionality in YouTube search results without much problem, but YouTube Instant (at least the current incarnation actually plays videos instantly based on what you type.

Michael Hart, another developer, has created "Google Maps Instant" and is not shy about letting Google know he wants a job too (hat tip to Alexia Tsotsis on that one).

September 12, 2010