Time is moving fast on the net. The medium changes so fast, that it already has lived through several transitions. For example, can you still remember how the Internet was before YouTube? When was that? Back in the 90ies? Of course not, YouTube went online on february 15th, 2005, so that’s 3 years only!!! Moreover, look at YouTube itself, haven’t there even been several generations of the platform in this short time?

But what role do time and temporality play in a medium like YouTube, when every second 10 hours of video footage is uploaded? You always see a very moment of the history of YouTube, symbolized through the “videos beeing watched right now” feature on the front page.

As the platform is changing it’s content so fast, it’s very hard to witness changes, e.g. the development of certain genres or the influences of videos onto each other. A software mashup called TimeTube tries to make the history of YouTube visible.

When you type in a keyword, the software shows you temporal relations between videos tagged with this word. Although, TimeTube is still missing lots of relations, you can use it to make some interesting observations. I typed in “dove evolution”, a very successful viral, which entailed numerous mashups, remakes and video answers. Through TimeTube I learned that it took 5 month until the first prominent remake (slob evolution) was released. I made another interesting observation on the “lifetime” of YouTube videos. “Dove Evolution” was release on October 6th, 2006. Most of the mashups and remakes were born between month 6-12 after the first release, but there are still reaction to the video after 1,5 years right now.

Ok, so go to TimeTube and become a YouTube historian yourself!