Must say that I never really liked YouTube either. My only visits are due to gratuitus links from other sites. Ah well, whatever floats the google boat.

Too many people think google is a "different kind of company". I don't buy into it. Google's just out to make cash, like everyone else.

of course they're out to make cash, but they're still different.

Nah, behind the thin veil they show... they're no better than any other corporation. I won't place the trust in them which some geeks attribute. This way, I won't be so hurt when they do show their real intentions.

hehehe... i'd still work for 'em :)

Boo-urns! Now all the fun unauthorized stuff is going to be coming down... no more music videos made up of TV show clips or anything. This sucks.
I should point out that I've only been on YouTube twice, but it still was a good idea.

Any idea how long it's going to take people to remove the copyrighted material? A while! I'm all for Google grabbing YouTube anyway. Would you rather Time Warner-AOL picked it up? Or Microsoft? Please. YouTube was FAR too attractive to Google to pass up. I predict A LOT of the material will stay up. Google makes stupid amounts of cash advertising so now there's a trade off: copyright holders will get advertising discounts and the content will remain the same; everybody wins.

The YouTube bubble will pop but Google will use it's audience as leverage for real video content down the road. AOL is in trouble, as is Microsoft - neither of them could afford to offer anything for it. The only real contenders were Yahoo! and Google, but Yahoo! is looking at facebook and likely let YouTube slip away (accidentally, perhaps?).

It's just another web 2.0 purchase of something that makes no money but has a huge following (see MySpace, Flickr, uh.. i dunno others. which are all effectively profitless.)