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YouTube Instant Creator Worked on Secret Facebook Project

YouTube Instant creator Feross Aboukhadijeh tells WebProNews he can't talk about his work at Facebook, because it's related to a project that is "still secret".  YouT...
YouTube Instant Creator Worked on Secret Facebook Project
Written by Chris Crum
  • YouTube Instant creator Feross Aboukhadijeh tells WebProNews he can’t talk about his work at Facebook, because it’s related to a project that is "still secret". 

    YouTube Instant has seen 715,000 visitors in six days. We talked a bit the other day about the "viral whirlwind" that the site created. We exchanged some words with  Aboukhadijeh, and he doesn’t really know how it happened. But boy, did it happen. 

    Aboukhadijeh, a student at Stanford University and an intern at Facebook was almost immediately offered a job  by YouTube CEO Chad Hurley over Twitter. This led to Aboukhadijeh going to YouTube HQ to talk to Hurley. 

    Creator of YouTube InstantBased on comments made on his blog and on Twitter, it looked like he basically had the job. " I look forward to supporting and improving YouTube Instant in the future," he wrote. "I hope to see it become a core part of the YouTube.com experience!" 

    He also tweeted, "@Chad_Hurley I had fun at YouTube HQ today. Looking forward to seeing what we can do with YouTube Instant!"

    Aboukhadijeh told WebProNews, however,  "I haven’t actually accepted the YouTube offer yet. We’re still figuring out how this is all going to work out, and nothing’s final yet. However, Chad and the engineers I spoke with were excited about the possibilities."

    Even still, as he watches the pageviews roll in, the buzz that YouTube Instant has generated still seems to be a bit of a mystery to him. "Not sure how it blew up so quickly. All I did was update my Facebook status. And it spread from there. Pretty crazy, huh?" 

    If the story portrayed in the book "The Accidental Billionaires" (the basis for the upcoming film, The Social Network) is accurate, Facebook itself grew in a similar fashion as Mark Zuckerberg sent a few friends his project. YouTube Instant isn’t likely to blow up to the level of Facebook, but it could get pretty big if it does indeed become integrated with YouTube itself. 

    "I think after things cool down a bit, I should carefully consider how exactly YouTube Instant went viral and write up a blog post to share my thoughts about it all," Aboukhadijeh tells us.

    "People really seem to be enjoying the site and it’s a huge hit," he says.

    We’ll be looking forward to that post, and to see what direction his career takes as a result of the whole thing. It’s just an interesting story. 

    He’s been working with one of Google’s competitors, but that is about to end. Google might be interested in that, as well.  "I work at Facebook right now. I’m a software engineer intern. My internship ends at the end of the week since classes at Stanford resume. I can’t talk about the project I worked on at Facebook – it’s still secret."

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