YouTube Founders Readying 'Zeen' magazine platform

It looks like YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen have a new service called "Zeen" -- designed to let users "discover and create beautiful magazines" -- coming soon.

Blog Fusible spotted a teaser page for the site earlier today, at zeen.com. The page features a box that lets visitors reserve a username; links to Zeen's Twitter and Facebook pages; and links to a page of job listings and a privacy policy. The jobs page lives at AVOS.com -- AVOS, of course, being Hurley and Chen's company, and the company that bought Delicious off of Yahoo a little less than a year ago.

During a talk at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum last March, Hurley said he and Chen were "dabbling with new ideas" for a start-up, adding only that they were looking at what might be done with the "basic components that every Web site needs to get off the ground," and that another idea had to do with indexing videos.

The Zeen teaser page says, simply, "discover and create beautiful magazines" and "coming soon."

The jobs listings page includes, as of this writing, half a dozen or so posts for programmers and designers.

After requesting a username, visitors to the Zeen teaser page get the following message:

Thanks for signing up!

We're really excited to show you what we've been working on, and we'll send you an email when it's ready to go. In the meantime, we sent you an email to verify your email address. Please click on the link in the email so we know you're you!

Bye till then!

YouTube is one of Silicon Valley's best-known success stories. Once dismissed by critics as a place for funny pet videos, the site is now a video archive, teaching tool, digital soap box where politicians go to stump, a means to expose criminals and police wrongdoing, a popular jukebox, and a vital news source for people all over the world. The service was acquired by Google in October 2006 for $1.65 billion.

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