What was your first time like?

I for one don't remember mine - I suspect there was music though, and I think it might have been with my ex-boyfriend. Or maybe it happened so gradually that the first time just sort of blurred away in my memory, becoming another insignificance.

There's really no reason for you to remember that far back - after all, it's only YouTube. Like the phenomenon of Google, Facebook and Twitter, it's joined the realms of becoming it's own verb. Want to re-watch that funny scene from Two and a Half Men last night? YouTube it. YouTube has helped every aspect of the entertainment industry more than any record label or ad campaign could ever dream. YouTube doubles as DIY radio, without the annoying DJs and receptive, unoriginal commercials - but it you want those, you can look up some of those videos too.

It's serving everyone; the college crowd who wants to watch the alarmingly impressive beer pong tricks video, the person who missed the band on Letterman last night, even housewives who want to see for themselves how a recipe is made. It's able to make everything in this world more interactive, entertaining, and most importantly, easily accessible.

In addition, so many other services have been made less useful - take MySpace for example. Back in my freshman year of college, MySpace was huge. Custom backgrounds, profile songs, friend lists - oh my. On top of that, MySpace music was taking off, which is still an industry standard for getting your music out there, but if you wanted to stream a song, you went to the artists' MySpace page. MySpace even had their own videos area, which for a while was more popular than YouTube.

Now, when you want to hear a song, you type it into YouTube. You're now friends with your favourite artists on YouTube. Granted, YouTube doesn't allow the fantasy of ogling your favourite celebrity “friends,” or making overzealous flash-based profiles, but the epileptic in all of us is thankful for that.

What I really am thankful for though, is it's capability to become a more reliable ratings source than Billboard. New sites, like Coverpop, list the top videos in every genre for that day - comedy, music (and different genres of music), television etc. This site is now showing what is actually popular, not just what the sales figures are for that week.

Finally, another use is to catch up on TV shows - no, it's not legal. And 90 per cent of the time the show isn't on YouTube as people don't even bother. But when you do find that occasional gem, it's great. And why? Why can't I just go to another site? Because I've been watching Desperate Housewives all week, and staring at pictures of half naked ladies in the sidebar, trying to sell me on “ancient weight loss techniques.” YouTube may use Google ads a bit more often than I'd prefer, but at least their ads are fully clothed and not lying to me.