The last ten days of my life have been sleepless, surreal, and an amazing adventure!
This is what’s new with YouTube Instant
- YTinstant.com hit one million visitors on Monday – just 10 days since I launched it!
- 28,000 Facebook Likes, 20,000 Tweets, and 14,000 Stumbles!
- Press coverage in New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, NBC, and hundreds more.
The answers to the questions everyone have been asking me:
I plan to accept the YouTube job and continue to study at Stanford. (Read more)- I will finish my internship at Facebook. It’s been an awesome ride – I’m extremely honored and thankful. (Read more)
Update: I decided to pass on the job offer. YouTube was good to me, but I’m more of a startup/small company guy.
Thank you, everyone!
I just updated YouTube Instant with a bunch of requested features:
- Video Controls - Play, pause, and video scrubbing controls
- Autoplay - when one video finishes, the next plays automatically
- Keyboard Controls - Use arrows keys to go to next video, Enter to pause
- Shareable URLs - Example: http://ytinstant.com/#8-bit
And I’m not going to stop there. I’m currently working on adding awesome Facebook integration, on-the-fly playlist creation, and custom ajax-updating AdSense units.
I understand that my site’s killer features are speed and simplicity, so those will continue to be my number one goal while building the site.
Media Coverage
Frankly, I feel flattered and honored by all the attention that YouTube Instant has received. I’m so thankful for the thousands of positive comments I’ve read on all corners of the Internet – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and blogs I’ve never even heard of before. I even got my own Wikipedia article!
There are also hundreds of articles that I can’t even read because they’re published in Italy, Spain, Germany, Chile, Peru, Puerto Rico, Columbia, Brazil, India, South Korea, Hungary, China, and Japan! YouTube Instant went global on a scale that I never could have predicted – only 40% of my traffic is from the United States!
Check it out: I’m in a Chinese newspaper (Oriental Morning Post) (click for full size):
Television Interview
NBC San Diego even wanted to do a TV interview with me over Skype. I couldn’t believe it! This was my first time being interviewed on TV!
Radio Interviews
I even did a couple interviews with some foreign TV and Radio stations. Here’s the bumper for Chennai Live 104.8 FM in Chennai, India.
Pretty cool, huh?
Did I accept the YouTube job?
This is the question that everyone keeps asking me. The answer is, yes, I will accept!</del>
I met with Chad Hurley (YouTube CEO) last week to discuss the job offer and what we can do with YouTube Instant. He and the engineers I spoke with were really excited about the possibilities.
I will continue my studies at Stanford University while working at YouTube. I can’t wait to start building some awesome stuff at YouTube!
Update: I decided to pass on the job offer. YouTube was good to me, but I’m more of a startup/small company guy.
Right now, however, I’m a software engineer intern at Facebook. I spent the summer working with an awesome group of engineers to build a new Facebook product. It was very exciting.
I am extremely honored and thankful for all the encouragement and support I received from everyone at Facebook. It is an awesome company, and it’s been an incredible adventure. I especially enjoyed the opportunity to work with Mark Zuckerberg. I look forward to working with them all again in the future.
Spinoffs
I’ve also seen about 20 different “Instant search” spinoffs for Google Images, Maps, Twitter, iTunes, Wikipedia, Amazon, and more. Thanks to everyone who gave me a shoutout on their site!
A few companies even sent me offers to buy YTinstant.com along with all my code! While it would certainly be nice to have free tuition for a few years, money is not why I built this.
I did it because I like to build cool stuff and see it improve people’s lives. I did it for the love of hacking. And most of all, I did it because it was fun.
The Real Challenge
Following the viral traffic wave, my server could barely handle all the traffic it was receiving! At one point, the server crashed when the Apache visitor log files filled up the whole hard disk! I’ve never had so much traffic to my websites before!
My Network Traffic - Last 30 Days:
After the swarm of viral traffic, the real challenge will be to sustain the YouTube Instant’s traffic without the help of a frontpage CNN.com story. Without a doubt, this will be difficult – but not impossible. The good news is that I’ve got a lot of ideas about how to do this.
These are exciting times!
Like YouTube Instant!
(If you liked this, you might like Freedom of Speech on the Internet.)
