Well, I went to the trouble of tweaking the graphic, so I’ll keep it there, but “GooTube” sounds like it caters to a particular gendre of videos… Mashable! has a good summary of the rumors about Google buying YouTube. Personally I can’t see why they would do it. Going in so many directions seems to be stretching Google pretty thin, plus there seem to be a lot of people out there for whom Google has replaced Microsoft as their most hated evil empire. (Or maybe all the comments posted to every story about Google are Yahoos that are still upset that they can’t figure out how they lost so much market share so quickly.) Sucking up another popular service would just make them evil to that many more people.
If people really don’t want evil monopolies, the internet user community needs to support the little guy, and the “little guy” web apps need to change their expectations. Not everyone can be worth $60 million like Kevin Rose. 
Right now VCs are throwing money at Web 2.0 startups and everyone fielding their web wares sprinkled with AJAX is looking to get rich quick. The way to get rich these days seems to be getting bought. I don’t think there are too many people out there thinking they’re going to be the next Google, they just want Google to buy them. But what is really getting bought? Does a site where you can post videos really require rocket science to create? (The answer is no.) Whoever buys YouTube will be buying users and, to a lesser degree, a brand. There are a couple problems with buying users and brands: they’re both hard to hold on to. Brands come and go quickly and it seems on the internet that they are harder to predict. Users have two gotchas, they follow the hottest brand and too many of them can ruin a good thing.
Google has seen and is still seeing both ends of the brand spectrum. In the beginning, they had a strong grassroots following that wanted an alternative to the establishment, but now some of those same people are calling them big brother. At the same time they have fans that are cheering them on for their perceived role in taking on Microsoft by creating a web version of Office.
Until getting into the social network arena, the size of Google’s user base didn’t much matter to it’s success. Umm, let me explain what I mean… As long as Google can continue to scale up their backend to meet demand and their profits scale up too, it doesn’t matter to the end user that there are 2 million other people looking up “illuminati” at the same time. Although when there are 2 million other people posting a video of their kid doing something cute, that’s 1,999,998 videos that they don’t want to sift through (everyone wants to see my daughter, she’s REALLY cute 
). My point is that there has to be some sort of sweet spot for the size of a community to work. Once there is a certain critical mass of eyeballs looking in the same direction, the spammers and con artists come out of the woodwork.
Social networks are features laid over top of a community to make things easier and online communities have existed for a long time in a variety of sizes, with and without profits. The only hard costs are bandwidth and hosting. Services don’t need to be done on a massive scale to provide value to the consumers. For example, I use a piece of software called myLifeOrganized to handle my to-do list. There isn’t a giant market for this particular app, but the developer makes some money off of it. In return for paying for this niche app, the developer listens to his users and keeps improving it to fit their specific needs. It’s like having my own personal developer writing a tool for me. If Microsoft bought him out and incorporated it into Office, my suggestions would never be heard, much less implemented in a week or two.
Well, I’ve ranted long enough; I better make my point. If we all stop dreaming about 15 minutes of fame and getting rich quick, maybe all these startups can find their niche, make consumers happy and make a decent living.
