At Google, Chris Zacharias spent his "20 percent time" building a new version of YouTube just for places with slow internet connections. It was called Feather, and the basic idea was to build a YouTube page that contained no more than 100 kilobytes of data, so that it could quickly load on machines in developing countries and other places where internet pipes were painfully narrow.
In the end, Feather worked well enough, bringing YouTube to many places that had never used the world's most popular video site. But building the machine was far more difficult than it should have been, mainly because Zacharias didn't have an easy way of shrinking the still thumbnail images that represented each YouTube video. These still images -- the pictures you see before you hit "play" on a YouTube video -- had been created for relatively fast internet connections, so they were quite large. In building Feather, Zacharias wanted to shrink them down to something smaller, but that was an almost impossible task. This was 2010, and YouTube already spanned billions of videos.
By: Cade Metz, Edited by: Kadhim Shubber
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via Wired.co.uk
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-05/31/imgix-graphic-card-internet
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