[thaufeki]

Also, these sites had a play on hovering over a video thumbnail feature that youtube copied

[hackernewds]

To be fair these seem like naturally intuitive and simple ideas

[rudasn]

...once someone else had thought about it and executed them in an intuive manner

[alenrozac]

...like Google Earth?

[mtmail]

Terravision existed prior (https://www.dailydot.com/debug/google-earth-sued-patent-infr...)

[SllX]

They probably got it from Snow Crash. The oldest surviving globes of the known world date back to 1492 according to Wikipedia and the Greeks probably created their own variations a few millennia ago.

Turtles, turtles, turtles! All the way down.

[RF_Savage]

Which was Googles version of NASA WorldWind?

[SllX]

Keyhole EarthViewer predates WorldWind and is what became Google Earth after Google acquired Keyhole.

[RF_Savage]

Cool, did not know that. Apparently the idea was less novel than I thought.

[flappyeagle]

you just described the definition of good design

[mrguyorama]

It was so natural and intuitive that Youtube's version STILL doesn't compare to how good, fast, seemless, and unintrusive it is done on the porn sites, years later.

[hammock]

It's actually patented by a porn site and YouTube pays them for the licensed use of it

[groffee]

Source? I don't see any possible way a thumbnail playing on hover is patentable.

[hammock]

Can’t find a source for my actual claim but here is a similar patent that Google claimed themselves: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9363579B2/en

[tomger]

... like searching for text on the internet