YouTube’s announcement tonight wasn’t higher quality videos (yet), but a set of new APIs and expanded features. YouTube now describes itself as “an open, general purpose, video services platform, available for use by just about any third-party website, desktop application, or consumer device.” There’s a video embedded below with YouTube co-founder Steve Chen and others talking about the new features – including right at the end a nice little Steve Ballmer impersonation by Chen! The new APIs announced on the YouTube blog were:
- Upload videos and video responses to YouTube
- Add/Edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc)
- Fetch localized standard feeds (most viewed, top rated, etc.) for 18 international locales
- Perform custom queries optimized for 18 international locales
- Customize player UI and control video playback (pause, play, stop, etc.) through software
Update: See also the blog post on the official Google blog today about YouTube’s integration into forthcoming mega-game Spore, a great example of what will be made possible by these APIs.
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)