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YouTube.com CEO Chad Hurley, one of the nicest guys we met at the Sun Valley mogul fest, is now laying the smackdown on Microsoft in an interview with Andy Plesser’s video blog Beet.TV from the Always-On conference this week.

In it Hurley likened Microsoft’s rumored overtures in the user-contributed video market (in a project code-named “Warhol”) to Yahoo’s attempt to beat eBay in the online auction marketplace.

Hurley tells Plesser: eBay “had an auction product that gained critical mass. Yahoo came by and started creating their own technology–potentially better technology. But they didn’t have the consumers to pull it off. We’re in the same situation here with our video site.”

Earlier in the day, Hurley responded to questions about Microsoft posed by the Wall Street Journal’s Kara Swisher at the conference. Hurley said that although he believes Microsoft is “building a clone of our service”, he’s not really breaking a sweat, according to ZDNet’s Between The Lines blog.

Is Hurley a wolf in sheep’s clothing?