Today one of the funniest things lately happened: somebody mailed me with a gig offer.
The author found my freelancer profile on the rubyonrails wiki, and most likely found yesterday about the Google Youtube acquisition.
So he came up with a brilliant idea: why not hire a freelancer to build him a YouTube clone? Who knows, maybe he’ll get a billionaire in notime. All thanks to the magic of outsourcing and Romanian-based freelancers…
I want to createa site similar to youtube.com where users can upload video or audio in various formats and have it converted to the Flash format (.flv) on the fly to be viewed immediately.[...]
Why was this funny?
Because of the final paragraph:
I am a student and don’t have much money, but maybe you would be willing to take on the project for some recognition and and (hopefully) $500 or so?
So… anyone else wishes to become a billionaire? Apparently I could be the one to help you do it: it’ll cost you just 500$.
No kidding… … LOL… :))
PS. Hope the author of the aforementioned email won’t find this post insulting; it’s just that non-techies have a hard time understanding the amount of work and the costs involved in building a youtube clone: not even 50.000 dollars will cut it..
orice altceva! Este gratis! :)
the world is full of morons, didn’t you know?
11/10/2006 @ 3:38 am
you can get a cheap-buggy-youtube-clone-wannabe-script for like $2-300 these days
11/10/2006 @ 4:16 am
Really? Where? Somehow, I kind of fancy becoming a billionaire this way
11/10/2006 @ 4:41 am
Or you could do it for free with ning (http://www.ning.com/)
11/10/2006 @ 5:08 am
i think the difficulty of youtube is not the software itself (easy to replicate, do it in RoR), but the infrastructure: bandwidth, clusters, etc.
13/10/2006 @ 1:53 pm