Friday, December 5, 2008

YouTube Dreams

After reading Mark Cuban's take on YouTube, I began to think of other forms of digital phenomena that captured my imagination, only to be ruined by corporate interference. It's not the corporations fault. People were spreading around content that was owned without compensating the owners. The life cycle goes something like this: some college kid creates some kick ass application, then a few million people use it, then we start to see a bunch of awesome, creative ideas distributed to millions of people that otherwise would never have seen them, and then big media companies try to cash in, then the site goes to shit. I remember Napster, don't you? MySpace, Facebook, YouTube. They're all going down. What seems to be too good to be true usually is. But hey, they were fun while they lasted.

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