New Website Shares Random iPhone Videos That Time Forgot
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There are now well over 14 billion videos on YouTube, which means that for every major influencer and viral video on the streaming service, there are billions of others that have almost never been seen.
These days, most videos uploaded to YouTube are deliberate publishing attempts, but there was a time before iCloud, Google Drive, iMessage, and WhatsApp when YouTube was used as a much more casual video sharing service.
Not only was YouTube the most convenient way to share video clips with friends and family, but even Apple leaned into this in the early iPhone models. The original iPhone had a baked-in YouTube app that was developed by Apple rather than Google in a partnership where the streaming giant rendered videos in H.264 rather than Flash explicitly for viewing on iPhones.
During much of that era, the iPhone operating system that would later become known as iOS also had a built-in “Send to YouTube” feature as it was the most convenient way to share videos in those days — and it turns out a lot of people did exactly that. In June 2009, YouTube reported a 1700% increase in the first six months of 2009, with a 400% jump in the single week following the release of the iPhone 3GS.
Many of these casual clip-sharers never bothered to clean up those clips, and it turns out they’ve lived on YouTube for well over a decade, unseen and just waiting to be stumbled upon. Now, it looks like a clever web developer has provided a way to relive millions of these random moments from the lives of early iPhone owners.
Shared by The Verge, the “IMG_0001” website, named in honor of the default titles of most iPhone-uploaded video clips, is the brainchild of Riley Walz, who was inspired to create it after seeing a blog post by Ben Wallace about the history of the “Send to YouTube” feature and how it’s possible to search out these videos by using the IMG_XXXX format, where “XXXX” is any random four-digit number you like.
There’s something surreal about these videos that engages you in a way you’ve never felt. None were edited, produced, or paraded for mass viewing. In fact, many were likely uploaded by accident or with a misunderstanding that complete strangers could see it. YouTube automatically removes harmful or violent content, so what remains exists in a unique, almost paradoxical state: forbidden, yet harmless. Putting all this together, searching IMG_XXXX offers the most authentic social feed ever seen on the Internet- in video, no less!Ben Wallace
Walz’s website is an extension of Wallace’s manual search idea. He made a bot that crawled YouTube and came up with five million of these intersections into clips from random iPhone users — what he calls a “time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives.”
The IMG_0001 site plays videos randomly from YouTube and wraps them in a player that shows the view count and original post date. Clicking on either of those will take you to the YouTube page for the video, providing more information on who posted it and any descriptions or comments. Unsurprisingly, though, most of these videos have extremely low view counts — many in the single digits, and little other information beyond the uploader’s account, which may or may not lead to additional videos.
While the experience can seem disturbingly voyeuristic, it’s important to keep in mind that every one of these videos was uploaded publicly to YouTube. Many of them have been there for well over a decade, secured merely by obscurity.
