YouTube Engineering and Developers Blog: April 2011

Engineering and Developers Blog

What's happening with engineering and developers at YouTube

ShortForm: Mix and Share the World's Videos

Thursday, April 28, 2011

By Jereme Monteau, Lead Developer at ShortForm
(Cross-posted from the Google Code blog, where it is a part of Who's at Google I/O, a series of guest blog posts written by developers who are appearing in the Developer Sandbox at Google I/O.)
ShortForm is a new entertainment medium where you find continuous channels of the best videos, curated by a growing community of VJs. At ShortForm you can be a viewer, a VJ, or both. Viewers subscribe to channels of interest, lean back, and enjoy a continuous stream of videos. VJs mix and share the world’s best videos into continuous channels.

The developers at ShortForm worked with various YouTube Data APIs in order to deliver both the Viewer and VJ experience.

Standard Feeds and User Playlists: ShortForm makes it easy and fun for anyone to VJ a channel. We also auto-curate a select set of channels to surface mainstream content that would appeal to most audiences. For example, our YouTube Hits channel includes content from the standard YouTube video feeds such as Top Rated, Most Viewed and Most Popular. ShortForm developed a system for retrieving video entries and their associated metadata, and then ordering them in playlists based on a ranking algorithm.

Favorites and Uploads: ShortForm allows VJs to import their YouTube favorites and uploads into their channels quickly and easily by authenticating via YouTube’s OAuth provider. Once a user has connected their ShortForm account to their YouTube account, we are able to allow them to import their favorites and uploads through an authenticated call to the YouTube Data API. In the future we will streamline the process of uploading videos to YouTube by allowing VJs to upload videos to YouTube directly from ShortForm while adding those videos to their ShortForm channel in the same flow.

Player API: Providing a seamless channel viewing experience on ShortForm requires that we integrate tightly with YouTube’s JavaScript API to the ActionScript 3 player. This allows us to properly handle video events to ensure continuous playback. Users have full control over their viewing experience using the next and previous video buttons, which load videos into the YouTube player. We have also begun integrating with the new iframe API interface that is currently in beta and have seen promising results in our initial tests across desktop and mobile platforms.

Android Tablet: Tablet computing represents an exciting opportunity for ShortForm to provide a first class viewing experience in a new package. We have begun testing and looking for places to optimize the viewing experience on tablet devices.

ShortForm Widget: Our embeddable widget syntax was inspired by YouTube’s new iframe embed syntax. We believe this is the simplest, most flexible and most powerful way to allow our users to embed their channels anywhere on the web.

We are thrilled to be a part of Google I/O and in order to demonstrate the power of ShortForm, we are putting together a Google I/O Sandbox channel, a continuous channel of product pitches and demos from companies represented in the I/O Developer Sandbox. We invite all Sandbox companies to submit a video of their product pitch or demo. Details can be found at the ShortForm at Google I/O page. Well use the channel to preview cool companies in the Sandbox before the conference. The channel will also provide media members with a summary of all the technology from all sandbox companies.

Lastly, we are going to have a little fun and invite all attendees to vote on their favorite pitches and demos. Submit your video on the ShortForm at Google I/O page. We’ll surface a leaderboard showing videos with the top votes, and the winning entry will be highlighted in a press release and will get prime placement on ShortForm’s homepage for one week, reaching hundreds of thousands of people.

Come see ShortForm in the Developer Sandbox at Google I/O on May 10-11.
As a founding member of ShortForm Jereme has been hacking around with the YouTube APIs for over a year now and has been building software for 15 years. When he’s not coding he’s probably trail running or roasting his own coffee while eagerly anticipating the arrival of his first child in June!

Google

Labels: googleio , io2011 , sandbox , shortform

Man vs. Machine: Curating with YouTube APIs

Monday, April 4, 2011

If you are reading this, chances are you are building an app which includes video. Given that over 35 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute, finding the best of it can be challenging. In this post we’ll discuss some interesting approaches and illustrate them with applications recently submitted to our YouTube API Project Gallery.

Use the feed

To get started quickly, API developers will find that using standard feeds is a great way to find content. In case you have not noticed, we have added two new experimental feeds: “most shared” and “trending videos”. They provide more of a real-time pulse of YouTube and expose some of the functionality behind YouTube Trends so that it can be accessed programmatically.

Storytelling apps

While standard feeds provide a convenient mechanism, content curation around common narratives calls for more complex apps. Let’s take a look at a few examples. Storify [1] and Memolane are two interesting applications addressing different aspects of creating a social media narrative around a story (the former) or chronologically-organized series of life experiences (the latter). History of Jazz is a good example of a mobile app using YouTube built around the concept of curation. The application uses iOS video playback techniques described in our earlier blog post on the topic and is a great learning tool for those of us who like to discover new music. Shortform is a curation platform for video DJs (VJs), where users can organize interesting content for their viewers to enjoy across a wide range of topics. And yes, you too can be a VJ!

Searching for a deeper meaning with semantic analysis

The apps presented in the previous section focus on empowering users to organize content. Another approach worth highlighting is a hybrid of curator’s selections and related content recommended by an algorithm. To achieve this, ViewChange.org by LinkTV, a non-profit committed to improving the world with storytelling, utilizes semantic analysis. As shown in the screen shot below, top-level categories are decided upon (or “bootstrapped”) by curators, however, while navigating the site users are presented with automated recommendations as well.

ViewChange.org

Wow, how did they do that?

To learn more about these applications, check out the project gallery. Additionally, some of these developers made more information available about their API experience so we’d like to take this opportunity to highlight it as well. Memolane put together a blog post about their usage of YouTube API, which you can read here . Shortform also blogged about their use case; follow this link to learn more. If you would like to understand how ViewChange integrated semantic processing in their video site, you can find their blog post about the topic here.

As always, if you have an interesting YouTube API project you would like to share with the developer community, please submit it to the gallery. We would love to hear from you.

Cheers,

—Jarek Wilkiewicz, YouTube API Team

[1] At the time of this writing Storify was still in Beta, but we have arranged for a special invite code for our readers. Use youtubeapirocks and you’ll be able to create your own stories.