Series of Fun Facts: Part I

It’s Friday, so lets tap ourselves on the shoulders for work well done this week (as I truly believe that no matter what, this week was good for everyone is one way or the other).

Do you like to find out different, interesting information? I know I do. Especially those little fun facts, that won’t crucially change your rhythm, but gives you that “Hmm, I didn’t know that – it’s interesting” feeling.

• Fun Fact Nr. 1: We all know that YouTube is a video-sharing website. I personally found interesting that it was created by 3 former PayPal employees (Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim) in February 2005, so in 2012 little YouTube is going to be 7 years old. YouTube is based in San Bruno, California, but it’s early headquarters were situated above a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California. According to a story that has often been repeated in the media, Hurley and Chen developed the idea for YouTube after they had experienced difficulty sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party at Chen’s apartment. Karim didn’t attend the party and denied that it actually occurred, while Hurley commented that the idea of YouTube being found after a dinner party was probably a marketing idea to create a true and digestible story. The very first YouTube video was entitled “Me at the zoo” and shows founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo. The video is still available: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw It is 18 seconds long, was shot at 8:27PM on the 23rd April 2005 and posted live that same day.

• Fun Fact Nr. 2: Did you know that you are able to express yourself in 140 characters and allow other people read it a.k.a. tweet nearly 6 years now? Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched in July 2006. Twitter gained worldwide popularity with over 300 MILLION users and generating over 300 MILLION tweets per day. Twitter’s origins lie in a brainstorming session held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. Dorsey introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group. The original project code name for the service was twttr. Work on the project started on March 21, 2006, when Dorsey published the first Twitter message at 9:50PM  “just setting up my twttr”. The first Twitter prototype was used as an internal service for Odeo employees and the full version was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006. Twitter spun off into its own company in April 2007.

• Fun Fact Nr. 3: As a blogger I can say that personally after trying Google’s blogspot.com and wordpress. com the second option is more closer to my convenience. WordPress first appeared in 2003 as a joint effort between Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. The name WordPress itself was suggested by a friend of Mullenweg Christine Selleck. WordPress won several awards – in 2007 it won a Packt Open Source CMS Award, then in 2009 won the Packt best Open Source CMS Award. In 2010 WordPress won the Hall of Fame CMS catefory in the 2010 Open Source Awards and in 2011 won the Open Source Web App of the Year Award at the Critters. WordPress is used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet‘s top 1 million websites and as of August 2011 powers 22% of all new websites. Currently it is the most popular CMS in use on the Internet. As of February this year, the version 3.0 was downloaded 32.5 MILLION TIMES.