YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steven Chen may be hoping to do for digital magazines what they did for online video.
According to Fusible, the duo have launched Zeen, and you can reserve your username for this cryptic new offering that may allow users to create and share custom magazine currations. Zeen announced on April 7:
In the last 24 hours, YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, who now run AVOS, posted a “Coming Soon” page on the website Zeen (a take on the word zine, which commonly refers to a narrowly focused self-published magazine).
Of course PC Magazine‘s Dave Murphy offers some sage caution:
…here’s hoping the general Internet population doesn’t launch 6,000 different cat magazines once Zeen goes live.
Let’s recall their announcement video having been acquired by Google, and wonder if we’ll see a similar video when they’ve sold Zeen to their former employer, Facebook or Yahoo…
As much as we content creators and “community” members from the golden age of youtube like to highlight our significance in getting the site on the map, it cannot be denied just how significant a role illegal uploads played in drawing a lot of traffic to youtube. My guess is that unless bootleg copies of Time and the Wall Street Journal are available at ZEEN, Chad and Steve will not be repeating their success.
then u have to worry about copyright still.
The Zeen tagline is going to be “Cut anything from anywhere and paste it together.” Yes, that means reinterpreting the word copyright once again.
It’s like Google Books but user-driven. Let’s toast to YouTube all over again!