After an eight-year silence, YouTube's co-founder Jawed Karim
has made his second-ever post on the site – to fuel the controversy over
Google's changes to its comments system.
On April 23rd 2005, Karim uploaded
YouTube's first video, of himself at
the zoo. Then he went silent until, eight years later, he posted a question on his channel:
why the fuck do i need a google+ account to comment on a video?
Google's
overhaul of YouTube comments has sparked controversy: theYouTube video announcing the change has
nearly 30,000 comments, many including harsh criticism of the move through the
medium of ASCII art.
As Karim has noticed, the site now requires a Google+ account to
comment. That has clearly angered him. Other commenters have said that they
won't use Google+ to comment on YouTube videos – and so will stop commenting.
The company argues that this is
necessary to personalise comment sections for each viewer: "You’ll see
posts at the top of the list from the video’s creator, popular personalities,
engaged discussions about the video, and people in your Google+ Circles," Google explained
in a blogpost.
But others suspect that its intention is to artificially boost
the apparent number of users of its Google+ social network.
Google+ has been the source of dissent for some users as Google
first added a G+ account to every Gmail address, whether or not people wanted
it, used it to reward peoples' position in searches, and then made it essential
for commenting on Google Play reviews.
However the company has been reluctant
to share details about how many people actively use the network for social
purposes, with one reportsuggesting that
there were fewer than 10 million daily users in mid-2012. Google has provided
less clear "activity" figures – citing 540 million active users who
take "some sort" of social action each month, and 300 million
"in stream" monthly users. Adding YouTube comments could increase
that enormously – perhaps to as much as Facebook's 1.2 billion monthly
users.
Karim was working at PayPal in 2005
when he met Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, the other co-founders of the company.
But he took a back seat to the growing venture, instead enrolling in Stanford
University as a computer science graduate student while acting as an advisor to
the site. When YouTube was acquired by Google in 2007, Karin's payoff
was worth around $65m.
Source:TheGuardian
previous article
Newer Post
No comments
Post a Comment