Google readying new YouTube API

news
Jun 8, 20072 mins

Google is building a new YouTube API -- part of its plan to knit YouTube and its videos into the fabric of the Web

Less than a year after agreeing to buy YouTube, Google is finally throwing its considerable development resources behind the massive video sharing site and tying its content more tightly into its Google’s sprawling searchtopia. The first domino to fall was Google Universal Search, unveiled in May, which changed the way Google search results are displayed so that video and map information was grouped in with regular news and Web site content. As the searchengineland blog notes, the algorithm tweak has boosted YouTube traffic by around 8 percent since May.

Now YouTube is readying a new API for YouTube that will greatly expand on developers ability to manipulate video, creating all manner of new YouTube mashups. The folks over at Programmableweb.com point to news out of Google’s Developer Day last week about the new API, which will be based on the Google Data (GData) standard.

According to the YouTube Developer Blog, the new GData API will eventually replace the YouTube API and provide more scalability, better integration with existing GData APIs, libraries and development resources.

Currently, Google is still taking requests for new features in the API, with calls for better hooks into the API that would allow developers to extend player functionality (play, seek, pause) to their Web pages tops the list, along with calls to bring back searchable user playlists.