A BORED STUDENT from Stanford University managed to snare himself an unlikely job offer after spending a few hours creating a massively popular new search tool for YouTube videos.
Feross Aboukhadijeh (19), who is currently finishing an internship at Facebook, was sitting in his dorm room at the university with a roommate on Wednesday when they heard about the launch of Google Instant, the new product from the search giant which displays live search results as the user types their query.
Casually, he bet his roommate that he could create a similar product for YouTube within an hour. He lost his bet, but had a working version of YouTube Instant finished three hours later.
He spent a couple more hours Thursday sprucing up the user interface and before going to sleep that night he posted his work to his Facebook page. “When I woke up Friday morning there was craziness,” he said.
Among the messages Aboukhadijeh received complimenting him on his product, which had already made its way around the world on Facebook and Twitter, was a tweet from YouTube’s CEO Chad Hurley – asking him if he’d be interested in working for the microblogging site.
Aboukhadijeh replied asking if that was “a for-real job offer? ;)” – and was met with an email reply asking to set up a meeting for a job.
Similar ‘Instant’ products have already sprung up, with one website – Instantise.com – amalmating instant search products for Google Maps, iTunes, Twitter and Flickr as well as Aboukhadijeh’s YouTube searcher.
