At the Zoo

Early in the spring of 2005, Jawed Karim visited some friends in San Diego and met up with a high school pal at the city's famed zoo. While standing outside the elephant exhibit, Karim pulled out his point-and-shoot digital camera. "I had made up a list of random videos I wanted to do," Karim told me. "One was doing a silly introduction at a zoo." Karim switched on the camera's video mode and handed it to his friend Yakov Lapitsky, asking Lapitsky to film him. "All right, so here we are in front of the elephants," he says at the outset of the eighteen-second clip. "The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long, um ... trunks. And that's cool. And that's pretty much all there is to say." Yakov returned the camera to Karim and the old friends parted ways, neither realizing the puerile joke they had just recorded was destined to become internet history.

Five years prior in 2000, Karim, the son of a researcher from Bangladesh and a German biochemistry professor, left college early to join PayPal as one of the online payment platform's first developers. (He completed his computer science degree by correspondence a few years later.) It was there that he made two friends, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, a friendship that would change the course of his life, my life, and maybe yours too.

By late 2004, Karim, Hurley, and Chen had all left PayPal and were meeting up regularly to discuss startup ideas. One opportunity that seemed enticing was creating a better video experience. In those days, you may recall, uploading and watching video online was kind of awful. For example, you generally had to host it on a website, if you had one, and provide people with a link they could use to download the file, praying they had the proper kind of video player installed to watch it.

Despite all the headaches people faced, a network of online clip sharing emerged, demonstrating consumer desire for a portable, discoverable, always accessible video solution. The reaction to the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction" at the 2004 Super Bowl made this clear, as did the digital dissemination of an eviscerating exchange The Daily Show's Jon Stewart had with hosts of the cable news show Crossfire, a clip that, through BitTorrent and file sharing, had been watched millions more times online than when originally broadcast on CNN. Meanwhile, the tragic tsunami in the Indian Ocean in December 2004 proved that video-capturing devices like camera phones and digital cameras had become so ubiquitous that they could be used to docu- ment events all over the world with unprecedented scale and diversity of perspectives.

The pieces were there. Broadband access enabled higher-bandwidth streaming and Macromedia's Flash began supporting video, which allowed the YouTube team to ensure seamless integration into web pages. In the preceding years, sites like LiveJournal, Flickr, Wikipedia, and, oddly, Hot or Not had refined the basic elements of community-based online-content experiences. None were super complex in implementation. Karim, Hurley, and Chen would need to come up with an easy-to-use design, and then scale the infrastructure to support lots of people. Fortunately, Hurley had been PayPal's original designer and user-interface expert, and Chen and Karim had worked together on PayPal's architecture team, scaling the payment platform to millions of users. They weren't the only tech team with this idea, though; sites like Vimeo and Google Video had just launched. So, on Valentine's Day 2005, they quickly got to work, not even sure an infrastructure for such a site would be possible; hosting costs, the transcoding of hundreds of file types, and more presented legitimate challenges. Hurley later joked that had they known how complicated it would be, they never would have attempted it.

They weren't certain how people would use it either. They expected people might like to use it for video profiles about themselves and, famously, set it up as a dating site at first. In the initial design, you couldn't choose which videos you would watch; YouTube would pick for you randomly after you selected your gender and the gender/age window you were "seeking."

When deploying YouTube's first test server, Karim uploaded the video he recorded that day in San Diego. He titled it "Me at the zoo," because, well, leave it to an engineer to label something as efficiently and straightforwardly as possible. On April 23, the "Me at the zoo" test video became YouTube's first official clip. Two days later, Karim sent the following email to his friends:

From: Jawed

Date: Mon 25 Apr 2005 05:34:07-0400 (EDT)

Well guys, we just launched this site: http://www.youtube.com

Can you help us spread the word? Since we just launched, there are no girls on it ... YET.

Can you guys upload your own videos? Let me know what you think!

Jawed

But things got off to a slow start. There weren't many videos, and a number of them were merely clips of airplanes Karim had recorded. In an effort to increase uploads, they took out ads on Craigslist and put up flyers on Stanford's campus. They soon bailed on the whole dating thing because people weren't using it for that. They were using it to share videos of their friends and pets, funny sketches, unusual internet ephemera, and more. In June, the crew did some retooling, adding a "related videos" feature to help boost views, easier sharing tools, and critically, the ability to embed the YouTube player onto your own website.

The new features worked, and as the site began to grow they studied the metrics and discovered something interesting. "Every two weeks there would be one video clip, which would be a totally random clip, that just went through the roof and it would be so popular that it would just dwarf all the other video clips," Karim recounted in 2006. As the rate of uploads increased, so did the probability of hits like these, until the gaps between them started to shrink, and YouTube became, arguably, the fastest-growing website in internet history.

"Me at the zoo" was never one of these hits, of course. The vast majority of the video's tens of millions of views occurred after Karim's bad joke became a legendary artifact in the museum of internet history. "Me at the zoo" doesn't represent the razzle-dazzle of what would come later, but the simple, unassuming video is a perfect example of the kind of personal experiences the platform would come to facilitate over the years.

I've often wondered if, in the gaze of history, Karim wished he had said something different in that first...