Tech Shout!

And the ‘Invention of the Year’ is none other than YouTube.

Time Magazine has officially conferred the status of the ‘Invention of the Year for 2006’ status to the popular San Bruno, Calif-based, video sharing website YouTube.

YouTube is the brainchild of Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim and was sold to Google for $1.65 billion in October. The website beat out an 80-pound car and a robot designed to rescue wounded soldiers for the top spot on Time’s list, the New York Daily News reported Monday. Also competing was Gardasil, a vaccine that fights off a sexually transmitted disease and the Hug Shirt, which simulates the feeling of being embraced by a loved one.

Time’s editors wrote “Only YouTube created a new way for millions of people to entertain, educate, shock, rock and grok one another on a scale we’ve never seen before.” “The rules are different now, and one website changed them: YouTube.”

“YouTube had tapped into something that appears on no business plan,” writes Time’s Lev Grossman, “the lonely, pressurized, pent-up video subconscious of America. Having started with a single video of a trip to the zoo in April of last year, YouTube now airs 100 million videos and its users add 70,000 more every day.”

YouTube allows users to upload videos of all formats onto the site, which then shares them in a format compatible with nearly all web browsers.

YouTube inherits the tiara from Snuppy, the cloned puppy who was winner of the magazine’s 2005 award.