While Apple has declared that I'd "be surprised by some of the stuff" I found lurking behind the YouTube button on my iPhone, I've mostly been frustrated by the videos I can't find. YouTube and Apple had promised to expand each week upon the 10,000 videos available at launch until the entire catalog is converted to the H.264 format this fall, but there remain glaring gaps in its current inventory, especially if you're looking for your friend's latest animation experiment.

Like many sites optimized for the iPhone, DailyMotion's iPhone homepage loads quickly because its been nicely stripped down.

In the meantime, however, Daily Motion (click here for full version; click here for iPhone version) has provided an alternative to the iPhone's underwhelming YouTube app. With 26 categories ranging from "Animals" to "Politics," an endless array of videos are at your disposal, neatly sorted in the same scrollable list that YouTube supplies. Videos take a little longer to load on the iPhone than the YouTube ones do, but the selection makes it well worth it, with scores of TV clips, concert footage, and a host of timewasters that the programmers at YouTube won't be uploading for another few months.

Yes, you can get stuff like a snippet from Terminator 2 performed by monkeys on DailyMotion.

Videos play in landscape or portrait mode and feature the same simple interface as their YouTube counterparts. Plus, Daily Motion's entire library is searchable. For example, a search for "Futurama" reveals many of the same clips as the desktop browser version, while just four of the roughly 9,000 available videos appear when the same search is conducted on YouTube's iPhone app.

The video quality on DailyMotion videos is comparable to that of YouTube videos on the iPhone.

I was even able to find my friend's creepy stop-motion version of "Itsy Bitsy Spider," (click here for full version; click here for iPhone version) which hasn't made it to YouTube on the iPhone yet. I discovered that it's just as disturbing on the small screen.