Aw, They Grow Up So Fast – YouTube Turns Five

Your favorite waste of time celebrates a half-decade this week.

I’m one of the few who can remember life before YouTube. I even remember the very first video I watched – some home movie of an airheaded jock, drunk and throwing his cat down the stairs or something. Okay, maybe I don’t recall it with complete accuracy, but I do remember thinking one thing: “This will never catch on”. At the time, YouTube’s content was almost entirely comprised of horribly unfunny home videos.

Needless to say, five years later, feel free to color me previously-undefined shades of wrong; YouTube’s bandwidth last year equaled the rest of the internet, and as of today, users collectively get a sweet eyeful of over 2 billion videos a day.

Naturally, YouTube is celebrating its birthday the only way it’s able – with YouTube videos. Tap dance your fingers over to the Five Year Channel (or, if you don’t dance, click here), and take a look at the My YouTube Story project, which is documenting the site’s impact on the lives of individual users over the past five years. You can also take an interactive tour of the site’s history, touching on classic internet moments we’ll certainly all remember sharing together.

Happy birthday, YouTube. May you help us all waste precious man-hours watching trampoline accidents and kittens falling asleep for years to come.

[Via YouTube Blog]