YouTube Goofing up Just When it Shouldn't

Bill Gates' Windows 95 blue screen launch was just the first in a long line of similar errors that have happened ever since and have been overly covered by the media.

YouTube Canada's presentation turned to be a laughingstock because of a particular video that malfunctioned. Wednesday was not the best of days for Dick Soule, the manager of global accounts for YouTube who burst and said "All right, to hell with that video." Needless to say that the audience was stunned by his remark.

Drew Hasselback of National Post noted that according to Mr. Soule "the launch of the Canadian portal of the popular user-generated video Web site has been more successful, with video views up 10% and registration up 14% in the past month."

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, according to Wikipedia.

YouTube has launched several local "stations" in many countries like China, New Zealand, Canada and several more with the specific purpose of helping the local public have better access to the content uploaded from their country. As a reminder of how big YouTube got, as of November 2007, a search using its internal search engine for "*" returns 52.7 million videos (the asterisk is a commonly used wildcard character in search engines) and it has more than 500 thousand user accounts.