Me at the zoo, rewatched
· Interests · internet-history
Every so often I rewatch the first video ever uploaded to YouTube. It is nineteen seconds long. A man stands in front of some elephants and observes that they have really long trunks, and that that's cool, and then it ends.
What gets me is not the historical trivia; it's the calibration. Two decades of production arms-race later — jump cuts, thumbnails engineered like slot machines — the founding document of the entire medium is a guy pointing a camera at a thing he likes. There's probably a lesson in there about this website.
The embed above is also the demo for the <YouTube> component: what you see before clicking is a thumbnail and a play button, nothing more. The actual YouTube iframe — and the megabyte of script it drags along — loads only when you press play.