Mystery 12th App: YouTube on iPhone?

The iPhone “How To” commercial reveals on the phone’s home screen the presence of a 12th mystery app, as discovered by Dr. Macenstein earlier this week.

Whereas the iPhone we’ve been seeing since January shows two rows of 4 icons and one of 3, the iPhone ad showed a third row with 4 icons, as if the icons had been shifted over to make room for a 12th:

iPhone YouTube

After Macenstein revealed the slip-up, Apple edited the ad on its website to show only 3 icons in that last row.

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Why Steve Jobs Should Buy YouTube

YouTube

I just dug up this article from August 2006 where Robert Young suggests Steve Jobs should buy YouTube because “the online video phenom can be to the video iPod what iTunes was to the audio iPod.”

Young said YouTube could also be a platform for a “highly-coveted stream of online ad revenues, particularly within the fast-growth, high-CPM video ad segment.”

Young’s article was written before Google bought YouTube, so a buy-out isn’t looking too good for Apple now. But it’s interesting to think about what YouTube could have meant for Apple now with the coming iPhone in addition to the iPod.

Apple could build a feature into iPhone to allow users to share YouTube videos via their phones. They could also somehow integrate Visual Voicemail into YouTube, perhaps by letting users insert video clips into their phone messages. I imagine this would make the iPhone that much more appealing to younger consumers.