YouTube Instant and now YouTube Time Machine are examples of creative ways people are improving YouTube on their own.
Last Month, Stanford computer science student Feross Aboukhadijeh saw the Google (GOOG) Instant presentation and knew he could do the same thing to YouTube. He bet his roommate it would only take an hour.
He lost, it took three.
His creation, called YouTube Instant , won him some immediate acclaim as well as a million pageviews in just 10 days.
That’s when Google’s YouTube came a knockin’. Specifically, YouTube Founder Chad Hurly sent a Tweet Aboukhadijeh’s way. They made him an offer to come work at the search giant, and likely bring his three hour invention with him. But Aboukhadijeh already had a part time internship at Facebook.
Today, Aboukhadijeh took the job.
Hot on YouTube Instant’s heels is YouTube Time Machine. Mr. Peabody would be excited about this one…
It is a pretty simple premise: You pick a year and the site instantly starts playing some videos from (not necessarily encoded in) that year.
You can also stipulate a variety of categories: Video Games, Television, Commercials, Current Events, Sports, Movies and Music to narrow your search.
The site’s design borrows heavily from Apple’s (AAPL) Time Machine backup software, but Apple is pretty open to people borrowing stuff from them </sarcasm>
Another site built by Jonathan Bouman in just five days allows you to share your YouTube Playlists.
Someone else should be geting a job offer pretty soon.
