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YouTube just announced some major extensions to their APIs (see official blog-post), which finally enable uploading of video to their site. seems like my own hack, PHPTube, is therefor rendered obsolete, and for good… :). the new API (see the developer guide) seems to allow both user-triggered authentication (similar to what Flickr has been doing for ages) and direct uploading (similar to PHPTube). there might still be a future for PHPTube though, if I ever find the time to adopt the new API. compared to PHPTube, implementation of the new API’s process-flow seems rather complicated, so there might be demand for a simple wrapper. we’ll see… for now, well done Google!

update: Erick Schonfeld from TechCrunch points out what the new API basically means: Google offering YouTube as a (almost) whitelabel video-platform (”almost” since I guess videos will still be watermarked with the YouTube-logo)…

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YouTube’s API - basically a read-only set of RSS-feeds and XML/RPC-calls - currently doesn’t support scripted upload or download of videofiles. My quick hack PHPTube offers this featureset in a cleanly encapsulated PHP-class. Special interest goes to the upload-functionality, which virtually allows the integration of YouTube as a video-storage-backend into any other web-app. And while there are several download-scripts out there on the web, I’ve yet to find another uploader.

I’ve originally built PHPTube for using it within PLAY.FM (talking about automated upload of video-footage from our live radio-broadcasts), but since these things take some time I’ld love to hear if anyone out there has some use for my script…a simple digg would do as well

Warning: due to changes in the YouTube’s HTML, all versions prior 0.1.6 are obsolete!

Download: PHPTube 0.1.6 (fixed bug in getLast())
Requirements: PHP, PEAR/HTTP

Attention: If you’re looking for PEAR, goto http://pear.php.net/ and read http://pear.php.net/manual/en/installation.getting.php!

Ports: Java-port of PHPTube (by James Schopp), Python-Port (by Sylvain Boily), Joomla-Plugin (download-only, by Mohamad Ballouk) - thx!

Using PHPTube? Consider a donation, to keep things rolling…thanks!

Google is further narrowing down the space for niche mapping-mashups like frappr and flagr (and to some extent even more complex apps based on the Maps API, like austrian newcomer Tupalo) by releasing their My Maps feature. My Maps lets anybody create geo-mashups without the need to code, including photo- & video-annotation. sharing of maps is currently read-only, but I guess collaborative editing is the next logical step (click for some of my places).

(via GigaOM)

• Yahoo! not only announced unlimited storage for their Yahoo! Mail service recently, but - according to GigaOM - is also going to add an API to their mail-platform soon, enabling third-party developers to build on top of probably the most popular mailing-product on the web.
• TechCrunch reports on upcoming extensions to the Twitter API, which will allow developers to send SMS-posts to single, targetted Twitter-accounts (currently its only possible to send to all followers of an account). the implications might be profound, as TechCrunch and others have noticed:

Currently, it costs a lot of money to launch a start-up in the SMS/mobile space - you have to license a shortcode monthly ($500-$1000/mo), pay a SMS gateway provider, and then pay anywhere from $0.03 - $0.05 per inbound or outbound text message. It adds up. But now, if a start-up chooses to use Twitter as a command line to their web service, it’s free (until Twitter starts charging for it).

however, the upcoming API-features haven’t been announced officialy yet.

Lee Byron rendered some amazing graphs using his Last.fm-attention data. (via Mind Your Own Business). I guess he had to record the data himself, as Last.fm’s API doesn’t seem to expose historical data?

Niall Kennedy writes about a new del.icio.us API allowing to query the top tags & number of bookmarks of any given URL. while the API hasn’t been released officially yet, Yahoo! developer network already features a screencast introducing some of its capabilities. currently, the API seems to consist of a single URL which returns data in JSON-format when queried with the md5′ed hash of the requested URL. f.e., a check for del.icio.us metadata of play.fm returns the following result-set:

[{
"hash":"f636b74442302d5a3e1c7d646f530df0",
"top_tags":
{"mp3":6,
"house":6,
"techno":14,
"archive":4,
"stream":9,
"radio":36,
"streaming":6,
"audio":13,
"music":45,
"electronic":12,
"webradio":13},
"url":"http://www.play.fm/",
"total_posts":71
}]

go to JoostdeValk.nl for some simple php wrapper-code, or subscribe to the official del.icio.us-blog to stay updated on the matter.

update: del.icio.us now also offers a widget exposing the same data for easy integration.

Google just released an API for their Spreadsheets product as part of the larger Google Data APIs (”GData”), which also allow 3rd parties to access Calendar, Base, Blogger and Code Search. the API supports read/write-access to existing documents, though - according to Google Blogoscoped - it’s not possible to create new spreadsheets (yet).