I don't know. I can't think of any video sites offhand that are _worse_ than youtube in most respects. The player is small, grainy, hard to control. The "commun

I don't know. I can't think of any video sites offhand that are _worse_ than youtube in most respects. The player is small, grainy, hard to control. The "community" is full of appalling idiots. The search feature is the worst I've ever seen. They did scale it very well--outages seemed minimal. I'm sure that is the greatest technical challenge for video. Flickr is a real puzzle. Any jackass could have made that site. I think the stars just aligned for them. People can flippantly say things like, "Oh, Microsoft got lucky" or whatever, because they did get some breaks. But MSFT also did real work, not easily replicated. Flickr--geez. Most online stores have a photograph engine of some sort that does the same thing, as just one tiny feature.