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When YouTube launched in April 2005, its first video was a 19-second clip of co-founder Jawed Karim standing in front of elephants at San Diego Zoo — the site was originally built as a dating service, and the elephant clip was uploaded because no one had sent in a profile
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YouTube, in the spring of 2005, was a dating service.
RealPlayer had been streaming clips since the late 1990s; Vimeo launched in November 2004, five months before YouTube’s domain was even registered; Google Video was already in beta.
What the record shows about the elephant clipThe neat version of the origin story — dating site fails, Karim films elephants, YouTube is born — is largely true, but it flattens the timeline.
What survived into the presentYouTube today is a different piece of infrastructure from the Flash-based clip site of 2005.
The dating site never had a second video.