YouTube Doubler

» see youtubedoubler.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

YouTube Doubler did one thing. You pasted two YouTube URLs into two boxes and set a start time in seconds for each. Then you pressed a button marked Double up. The page played both videos at once, side by side, and handed you a short link to the pair so you could send it on.

That is the entire product, and it was enough to keep a domain alive for thirteen years. The joke format it served is older than the site: play a clip of somebody doing something, and a piece of music that makes it funnier. Doing that before 2007 meant a video editor and an upload. YouTube Doubler turned it into a URL you could drop into a comment, and the result carried a title that read like a fight card, one video versus the other, credited to whatever VJ name the maker had typed in.

The header called the version "Gamma" and the line in the top right corner read "Mashup helper". Under the two players sat a row of share links, with a Disqus thread beneath them in time.

~ the record ~

~ do a double ~

The form carried a field most tools of this kind would not have bothered with: "Your VJ name (optional)". A double was attributed to somebody. The site kept favorites and a list of the newest ones, so the output of the tool was browsable, and people came to watch what others had made instead of only to make something.

None of it required an account anywhere, which is what dates it most.

~ buh bye ~

The domain was registered on 3 May 2007 and the Wayback Machine's first capture is from 8 July that year. The last capture of the working site is 12 February 2020, at just over 15 KB. On 14 February 2020 at 18:08 UTC the archive caught the replacement, about half a kilobyte of it: "Buh Bye YouTube Doubler. Thanks for all the fun, but after 12 years of good times it's time to say good bye." It was still up on 5 March. The registration was due to expire that May.

No reason was given and none is recorded anywhere. A thirteen-year-old side project with an ad slot under the players does not usually issue a statement when it stops.

~ the forwarding address ~

The ending is better than the death. youtubedoubler.com still resolves, and it issues a permanent redirect to web.archive.org, to a capture of its own front page taken on 31 May 2014. Somebody renewed the domain past its expiry date and pointed it at the Internet Archive's copy of the site instead of letting it lapse to a squatter or parking it for ads.

So the address works. You land on a 2014 version of the page with two players loaded, and the Double up button does nothing, because there is no server behind it anymore. I never made one of these. The format reached me the way it reached most people outside the English-speaking part of YouTube, as a finished link somebody else had already built, with no hint that there had been a tool.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »