I just find it stupid how someone jumps a bandwagon and randomly things happen.
I bet many people did whatever shit*instant*, but this guy did a complete useless youtube instant and got some attention landed. It's probably more merit of twitter and being an attention whore than of the feature itself (i hated google instant too, perhaps with a few tweaks it can get nice enough, good idea, horrible execution).
I've seen a few stupid and easy internet projects getting millions in funding, just because "someone knows someone".
Youtube itself is a BIG fail, the only reason it's still alive, is because influential people created it.
My buddy asked me like 10 times around 2002-2003 for we to make a video site just the way youtube came to be (it was an obvious next step after the almost-dead-nowadays fotolog.net, which was an obvious step after the blogger.com phenomena)..
The trouble was always: WAY too expensive to be made, a LOT of money lost for a LOT of time...though luck finding someone dumb enough to invest on that (lots of servers with gigabits of bandwidt with no way of getting a FRACTION of the money back)...
Then "someone" launchs youtube...loses a lot of money...sells to google for billions...and google is still losing money up to this day (a L-O-T of money).
Oh, by the way, if it took him 3 hours, he is wayyy too junior to be hired for anything useful, this is really a "less than 1 hour" job...