YouTube opens APIs, gets tough on terms of service Greg Sandoval and Adrian Bridgwater, CNET News.com 14 March 2008 09:54 AM

In his official blog, YouTube’s Jim Patterson wrote on Tuesday: “We now provide a complete set of [create, read, update and delete] capabilities for uploading, managing, searching and playing back user videos and metadata from the YouTube ‘cloud’, managed by us. We do the transcoding, hosting, streaming and thumbnailing and we provide open access to our global audience.”

The release of the APIs comes at a time when YouTube is trying to elevate the perception of its site from a video portal to what it describes as “a video-services platform”, available to any third-party website or other application.

open api wikipedia

Open API (often referred to as OpenAPI) is a word used to describe sets of technologies that enable websites to interact with each other by using SOAP, Javascript and other web technologies. While its possibilities aren’t limited to web-based applications, it’s becoming an increasing trend in so-called Web 2.0 applications.

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