Leveraging YouTube's Data in the Cloud YouTube dominates the Online Video market with an attractive user audience loving Internet-based clips and videos they can view, listen, interact with and participate when, what and how they want.

YouTube is already among the top 3 global assets in terms of minutes spent online. A recent statistic of Hitwise shows, that YouTube is also current marketleader in terms of visits in the US:

Top 5 Online Video Websites ranked by Market Share of U.S. Visits

Rank	Name	Domain	May-08	May-07	Percent Change
1	YouTube	www.youtube.com	75.43%	59.95%	26%
2	MySpaceTV	www.myspacetv.com	9.01%	16.06%	-44%
3	Google Video	video.google.com	3.73%	7.80%	-52%
4	Yahoo! Video	video.search.yahoo.com	1.92%	2.77%	-31%
5	Veoh	www.veoh.com	1.13%	0.86%	32%

Currently I wouldn't know a better place to search for a video - even the most exeptional content can be found in the cloud. Recently I heared that the IOC will broadcast a selection of Beijing 2008 Olympic Games clips as Video On Demand to countries where digital VOD rights have not been sold.

There is many creative ways to integrate YouTube via API with a site or application:

• YouTube API Case Studies
• YouTube API Forum
• YouTube API Project Wiki

According to Google one can:

• Create a web front end to let people view videos about specific topics.
• Create a desktop application or plugin that plays videos in a customized environment.
• Add related, dynamic video content to your website or application.
• Customise the Flash player to fit the look and feel of your site, device or application
• Add feeds of videos from each of YouTube's international domains
  

Software as a Service (SaaS) has been one of the fastest growing trends in software over the past years. The new Google App Engine makes creating tools quickly and effectively and provides an opportunity for users to leverage the data that live in the cloud:

• Into the Cloud with Google App Engine
• Setting a New Web-Standard with OAuth for Secure API Authentication
• Web-Apps Evolution in the Cloud

Next generation asset YouTube is becoming an increasingly relevant distribution and monetization channel for video enhancing the customer experience distributing video clips and other forms of video over the Web anywhere and anytime, while traditional media have content still embedded making it only consumable at a certain time.

• Looking Forward to See a Mobile Web 2.0 Revolution!

Labels: apis, cloud, google, markets, mashup, web2.0, youtube

  ¶ 'Leveraging YouTube's Data in the Cloud' posted by eA : 1:01 AM  0 comments links to this post

  Web-Apps Evolution in the Cloud
Software as a Service (SaaS) has been one of the fastest growing trends in software over the past years. The new Google App Engine makes creating tools quickly and effectively and applying new Web-standards like OAuth provides an opportunity for users to leverage data that live in the cloud with the purpose to

• take advantage of the new social trends
• lower costs and improve functionality
• embrace innovative new products, services and applications
• increase knowledge and capability

Google with its mission 'to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful' has its strengths in market & brand leadership in online search and in an ever expanding online product portfolio with a great potential in cloud computing and synching services via Gears.

Here some useful GData APIs including YouTube:

• Google Apps APIs
• Google Base Data API
• Blogger Data API
• Google Calendar Data API
• Google Code Search Data API
• Google Contacts Data API
• Google Finance Portfolio Data API
• Google Health Data API
• Google Notebook Data API
• Google Spreadsheets Data API
• Picasa Web Albums Data API
• Google Documents List Data API
• Webmaster Tools Data API
• YouTube Data API

An excellent ressource for mashups, APIs and the Web as platform can be found at the ProgrammableWeb.

Labels: apis, bizdev, cloud, google, photos, strategy, web2.0, youtube

  ¶ 'Web-Apps Evolution in the Cloud' posted by eA : 4:10 PM  0 comments links to this post

  Setting a New Web-Standard with OAuth for Secure API Authentication Current trends in information architecture, the development of user-provided information and the use and combination of single function focused applications show that the Internet is shifting to a medium that is more and more structured with a decentralized authority.

• TnT 2.0 - Exploiting the Limits of Traditional Media

Instead of using a single site for all online needs users use different sites and services to manage their online experience applying state of the art Data APIs allowing aplications to access their data. Making use of a Web-standard like OAuth for secure API authentication gives your users access to their data while protecting their passwords and other protected areas. From OAuth:

"Many luxury cars today come with a valet key. It is a special key you give the parking attendant and unlike your regular key, will not allow the car to drive more than a mile or two. Some valet keys will not open the trunk, while others will block access to your onboard cell phone address book. Regardless of what restrictions the valet key imposes, the idea is very clever. You give someone limited access to your car with a special key, while using your regular key to unlock everything."

Here is a short demo of what it means to end users:

While reviewing one of the latest Google innovations, Google App Engine, which lets one run Web applications on Google's infrastructure with no servers to maintain I found it worth to mention OAuth as an open standard for secure API authentication - OAuth is now supported on all of the Google Data APIs. Being familiar with UML or sequence diagrams it's easy to understand the Google data API authentication process. More on Google Data APIs blog.


Resources:

• Beginner’s Guide to OAuth – Part I
• Beginner’s Guide to OAuth – Part II
• OAuth Authentication for Web Applications (Google)
  
• Registration for Web-Based Applications (Google)
  

Labels: apis, bizdev, cloud, google, mashup, networking, oauth, security, strategy

  ¶ 'Setting a New Web-Standard with OAuth for Secure API Authentication' posted by eA : 11:23 AM  0 comments links to this post

  Into the Cloud with Google App Engine Managing information becomes more and more important for individuals and corporations that want to use the web strategically to build value - in these days it's trendy to collaborate, share data and information over the Web.

If somebody asked me what kind of Google Apps I'm using regularly, well, there is award winning Gmail, Reader, iGoogle, Blogger, Docs and of course the most important: Search. Without search no information, without information no action. Google's automated search technology enables me to obtain nearly instant access to any relevant information.

One of the latest Google innovations is Google App Engine, which lets one run Web applications on Google's infrastructure with no servers to maintain. Currently it supports the Python runtime environment using Python version 2.5.2 and provides APIs for the datastore, Google Accounts, URL fetch and email services.

Although Python is not my speciality and my time is very limited, I found it quite comfortable to step into cloud computing with no servers to maintain, to follow the examples and create a first App with Google App Engine. It's early stage, but I think this service is very promising. It's not made to host any SAP datacenter, but it's made to extend the Google experience building modern applications on top of a worldclass datacenter with reduced maintenance costs and the purpose to

• create new opportunities for self-expression and collaboration
• complement and compete in products and services
• leverage network effects and monetization

The tool-kit includes the Django web application framework with form validation, version 0.96.1 or newer, supporting Dojo as state of the art AJAX incarnation.

Latest APIs allow to do image manipulation and caching through memcached, high-performance, distributed memory object caching system to speed up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load as I noticed through several blogs.

It encourages to make use of Web-standards like OAuth for secure API authentication, JSON, a lightweight data-interchange format based on a subset of the JavaScript Programming Language and and OpenSocial, to create apps that access a social network's friends and update feeds from Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

The rapid adoption of broadband has made it possible to move more and more applications to the Web.

• More on Google

Labels: apis, cloud, collaboration, google, networking, social

  ¶ 'Into the Cloud with Google App Engine' posted by eA : 11:53 AM  0 comments links to this post

  Google Developer Day: Going Offline with Google Gears
Just announced on the Google Developer Day in Australia Google Gears (in Beta) can already be experienced via the Google Reader if you use Mozilla Firefox. Just click on the Offline Link in the top right navbar of your Google Reader and follow the installation instructions.

While going offline Gears downloads the latest 2000 posts and synchronizes the Reader while going online again. Fine!

From Google Gears Blog:

'Gears is an incremental improvement to the web as it is today. It adds just enough to AJAX to make current web applications work offline.

Gears today covers what we think is the minimal set of primitives required for offline apps. It is still a bit rough and in need of polish, but we are releasing it early because we think the best way to make Gears really useful is to evolve it into an open standard.'

The next live stream from the London Developer Day takes place today at 12.00 BST (British Summer Time).

Developer Resources:

• Gears Homepage
• Gears API Homepage
• Gears API Blog
• Gears Groups
• MashUp Editor
• Google Web Toolkit

More Google Apps:

• Centralizing Information with new Google Reader
• Into the Enterprise with Google Apps Premier Edition
• Into the Air with AJAX

Labels: apis, bizdev, google, productivity

  ¶ 'Google Developer Day: Going Offline with Google Gears' posted by eA : 11:28 AM  0 comments links to this post

  Into the Enterprise with Google Apps Premier Edition It's always been messy to collaborate on projects created with MS Office products and to share them with co-workers. The better that Google launched Google Apps Premier Edition with new administration APIs aimed at businesses for the next-generation communication and collaboration.

• TrendSpotting: New Technologies First in Consumer Markets

Those applications are already out for a while, however the new thing is a premier edition option including:

• 99.9% uptime guarantee for email
• APIs for your existing infrastructure: Single sign-on and provisioning
  
• 24/7 assistance, including phone support
  

Google Apps are excellent AJAX-based communications tools reducing the amount of friction to interact with each other and to improve communications.

The rapid adoption of broadband has made it possible to move more and more applications to the Web and it's a step further to a Web-based collaboration-suite with drastically reduced maintenance costs with an option to buy further premium services.

Before using Google Apps one should read the GOOGLE APPS PREMIER EDITION AGREEMENT carefully and think of questions about privacy, ethics, security and technology support. It might also be interesting what happens in case of an outage or data losses.

• Into the Air with AJAX

Labels: apis, bizdev, collaboration, google, productivity

  ¶ 'Into the Enterprise with Google Apps Premier Edition' posted by eA : 11:58 PM  0 comments links to this post

  Creating Customized Applications via Mash Ups In these days it's trendy to collaborate, share data and information over the Web. It seems to me like the Web has quickly morphed into a giant global operating system which allows to remix the Web via mash ups.

Over a period of nearly two years I posted more than 200 entries on my personal blog. The increasing amount of posts made it necessary to apply new ways to look up existing entries and to extract information quickly with precision.

Applying the state of the art Google AJAX Search API this combination of Web-based applications across different sources offers a useful, cheap and easy way to create a customized application solving this issue.

I found it easy to integrate and a fast way to search several blog posts without leaving the site and the quality of search results for my blog improved a lot applying the GblogSearch module. Reason enough to give the search box a prominent place on top of the page now.

Extracting information quickly with precision inspired me recently to create two customized search modules featuring AJAX and Video. I'm thinking already about leveraging a mash up including groupware and collaboration, information management, knowledge management, content management, work flows, multi channel facilities and single sign on. Mash ups put more power in the hands of end users.

Labels: ajax, apis, bizdev, google, mashup, search

  ¶ 'Creating Customized Applications via Mash Ups' posted by eA : 7:47 PM  0 comments links to this post