Valleywag sniffs out the myth

And then there was one

Chad Hurley and Steve Chen got the idea for YouTube when, after a dinner party at Steve's San Francisco apartment, they had trouble sharing videos of the event. That's the foundation myth of Youtube, as emblematic as Pierre Omidyar's effort to sell his wife's Pez dispensers, a web project that became eBay. And it's about as bogus. Time gets the founders to admit that the germ for Youtube, which recently sold to Google for $1.65bn, came from another Paypal engineer, now largely written out of the story, Jawed Karim. The original idea: a video version of the Hot Or Not rating-and-dating site. The moral of the story: the original idea is worth nothing; a foundation myth is usually the creation of the company's first publicist; and it gets simpler with every press telling. Chad Hurley is more photogenic; even if Google's publicists insist on both Youtube founders being present for the photo shoots, watch magazine editors push the dorky Taiwanese-American engineer to the edge of the frame.