The expanded API includes YouTube activities like favoriting, uploading, and commenting on videos, which the company hopes will lead to an ecosystem of external applications that include “the obvious social network / feed aggregator integrations, to notification apps, to novel data views.” In a blog post, the company notes that privacy settings will be preserved on external apps, so, a video uploaded that is friends-only will not find its way to the public on third-party sites.
YouTube seems a bit late to the party on this one – I seem to find out about interesting videos via a lot of other mediums, ranging from friend’s sending me something, to Facebook or Friendfeed activity streams, to simply visiting YouTube. That said, real-time push notifications when folks you subscribe to upload or favorite a video is definitely of value to millions of people, and I’m sure we’ll quickly see several applications that leverage the API to addresses this need.
Additional YouTube Resources from Mashable
- 20+ Greasemonkey Scripts for Improving Your YouTube Experience