I’ve been going to the last few Metroblogging Vancouver meetups, and there are usually a lot of interesting conversations. Some of them, as you can probably imagine, stem into the realms of being slightly geeky.
For instance, the point was brought up that there has been a natural progression of using vowels as a prefix to a website domain, company, or product name. For the life of me, I’m not sure where the letter “A” fits into all of this, but “E” and “I” have been front and center for nearly two decades now. Email, iTunes, iPod, and so on. Keep going down the line and one starts to wonder about “O”, “U”, and (some times) “Y”. What’s the next, new, hot thing going to be? What way will these letters be used and abused?
Of course, how can you not talk about YouTube? Everyone is now that Google just picked it up for a pretty penny. Someone brought up the idea that it should have been “uTube” and not “YouTube”. This would have fit into that natural progression in the world of Web 2.0. I’m not sold on it, but the thought made for some good laughs.
However, utube.com does exist. Thing is, they don’t do anything with video.
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Utube.com, a Web site owned by a supplier of used tubes and pipes, has been swamped with visitors confusing it with online video service YouTube Inc. and has been barely operational since Google Inc. said on Monday it would buy YouTube for $1.65 billion.
“I’m at a point now, all I want to do is to make the site work,” Ralph Girkins, owner of the site belonging to Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corp., told Reuters on Thursday.
“Today, it’s been up the longest it’s been up for a week — an hour and a half,” said Ohio-based Girkins.
utube.com is the sixth most popular U.S. manufacturing Web site, ahead of Whirlpool Corp., according to data provided by HitWise.
On Monday, Girkins told Reuters an intermediary who said he was acting on behalf of YouTube had offered $1 million to buy the Internet address, but he turned down the offer and was holding out for $2.5 million to $3 million.
A YouTube spokesman said it had not made an offer and had no plans to do so.
On Thursday, Girkins said he had received about 20 phone calls from people who offered to sell his site for him. He has not been in contact with Google or YouTube, he said. [reuters]
Now it could be that this guy was thinking way ahead when he registered this domain, but he's certainly sitting on a gold mine. I find it fascinating that there is nothing Web 2.0 to the site itself. It makes complete sense that people would think that when they hear people talking about YouTube, they would think "utube" when they sat down at a browser.