This Day, That Year – April 23

This day in history we feature Jawed Karim. The first YouTube video, titled “Me at the zoo”, was published by co-founder Jawed Karim on this day in 2005.

Trivia – Jawed Karim

Jawed Karim is an American software engineer and Internet entrepreneur of Bangladeshi and German descent. He is a co-founder of YouTube and the first person to upload a video to the site. This inaugural video, titled “Me at the zoo” and uploaded on April 23, 2005, has been viewed over 260 million times, as of March 16, 2023. During Karim’s time working at PayPal, where he met the fellow YouTube co-founders Steven Chen and Chad Hurley, he had designed many of the core components including its real-time anti-Internet-fraud system.

Related read – YouTube to make educational content more accessible

The Los Angeles Times explained in 2009 that “as the first video uploaded to YouTube, it played a pivotal role in fundamentally altering how people consumed media and helped usher in a golden era of the 60-second video”. The Observer described its production quality as poor. Digital Trends called it a “nondescript affair” and “tongue-in-cheek” video that set “the tone for what was to come” on YouTube. Occasionally Karim has updated the video description of “Me at the zoo” to criticize decisions made by YouTube. On November 6, 2013, YouTube began requiring that commenting on its videos be done via a Google+ account, a move that was widely opposed by the YouTube community. An online petition to revert the change garnered over 240,000 signatures. In response to Google requiring YouTube members to use Google+ for its comment system, Karim wrote on his YouTube account, “why the fuck do i need a Google+ account to comment on a video?”, and updated the video description on his first video titled “Me at the zoo” to “I can’t comment here anymore, since i don’t want a Google+ account”. In response to pressure from the YouTube community, Google publicly apologized for forcing Google+ users to use their real names, which was one of the reasons the Google+ integration was unpopular with YouTube users. Google subsequently dropped its Google+ requirement across all products, beginning with YouTube. Google announced in October 2018 its intention to permanently shut down Google+, as it had failed to achieve broad consumer or developer adoption, and because of a vulnerability. Google+ was closed for personal accounts on April 2, 2019. In November 2021, Jawed updated the description of “Me at the zoo” to include “When every YouTuber agrees that removing dislikes is a stupid idea, it probably is. Try again, YouTube.” A few days later, Karim updated the description again to a more detailed condemnation of YouTube’s decision. The description was later removed, and as of January 2023 the video’s description is blank.

Source – Wikipedia