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YouTube's Chen visits homeland, discusses Web2.0

• Auteur:Annie Huang
• Date de publication:15/6/2007

Steve Chen (center) is welcomed back to his former school, the Chingshin Elementary School in Taipei, June 11 by Principal Chien Yu-ling (left) and young students. (CNA)

Steve Chen, Taiwan-born co-founder of the popular video-sharing Web site YouTube, made a weeklong visit to his home country starting June 7. His itinerary included meeting his Taiwanese business partners and a June 9 forum at which he spoke to representatives of the domestic information-and-communications-technology sector.

At the forum, Chen said he launched YouTube with Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim in 2005 just after Internet development had been threatened by the "bubble" scares of 1999 to 2003. They founded YouTube in the hope that users could easily share audio-visual content with others, using either Microsoft or Macintosh software, he said. "YouTube started with a very simple idea: just helping people to do something they are not able to do, especially when they are facing a lot of difficulties online," Chen explained.

Founded just two years ago when Chen was 27 years old, YouTube is now one of the most popular sites for users to upload their own videos and share those of others around the world. With its services expanded to mobile devices, blogs and e-mail, the site attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors every day.

Search-engine giant Google Inc. purchased YouTube for US$1.65 billion in October 2006, and visits to the site exceeded 10 million per day over the six months following acquisition, Chen said in a June 11 report on the Chinese-language news Web site ETtoday.

Chen discussed the concept of Web2.0 with other participants at the forum. This refers to the current era in which Internet content comes largely from users themselves. YouTube was a successful example of Web2.0 since it invited users to be content providers and form a Web community, said HoChen Tan, chairman of Taiwan's largest telecom operator Chunghwa Telecom Co. Ltd.

Chen replied that, although he found it hard to define Web2.0 precisely, he saw "personalization" as a major trend and stressed "user-first" as the company's philosophy. He and Hurley decided to sell YouTube Inc. to Google, having been impressed by Google's ability to provide technical support, he said, and by the match between its core value and that of YouTube, that was, to generate an infinite number of users and content that people wanted. Chen continued to serve as YouTube chief technology officer after the acquisition and was listed in the May 14, 2007 issue of Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Chen mentioned at the forum that the Mandarin version of the video-sharing site would come soon. "We want YouTube to look like a local site to promote the local community, and not look like a U.S. site to international users," Chen elaborated at a June 11 press conference, the Taipei Times reported June 12.

His most recent visit to Taiwan was aimed at acquiring a better understanding of the Asian and Taiwan markets, so that his company could provide localized services, Chen said, adding that his top concern was improving people's lives with technology, the Chinese-language United Daily News reported June 12.

Meanwhile, Chen said the company was considering setting up new Web servers in Asia, and Taiwan was one of the location choices, according to the UDN report. This intended to address the problem of waiting time for users outside the United States--who represented more than half of the site's visitors--to download videos from YouTube, said the report.

Write to Annie Huang at shihyin@mail.gio.gov.tw