Simon Willison’s Weblog

What platform was YouTube using before they were acquired by Google?

5th January 2012

My answer to What platform was YouTube using before they were acquired by Google? on Quora

It was written in Python—I don’t think they used any particular framework (they started the site in 2005).

Posted 5th January 2012 at 12:53 pm · Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter or subscribe to my newsletter

More recent articles

Thoughts on OpenAI acquiring Astral and uv/ruff/ty - 19th March 2026
GPT-5.4 mini and GPT-5.4 nano, which can describe 76,000 photos for $52 - 17th March 2026
My fireside chat about agentic engineering at the Pragmatic Summit - 14th March 2026

This is What platform was YouTube using before they were acquired by Google? by Simon Willison, posted on 5th January 2012.

frameworks 29 google 399 web-development 169 youtube 57 quora 1005

Next: Is there an open-content alternative to Quora?

Previous: Which tech startups in London have been funded in 2011?

Monthly briefing

Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.

Pay me to send you less!

Sponsor & subscribe