<category scheme="http://gdata.youtube.com/schemas/2007/keywords.cat">
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Update: This change also applies to <category scheme="http://gdata.youtube.com/schemas/2007/keywords.cat"> tags, which were not mentioned in the original announcement.

If you follow the YouTube Creator Blog, you might have recently seen a post announcing that video tags (also known as keywords) would no longer be displayed to viewers of a video on YouTube’s website. They aren’t going away from the video itself, though—the owner of the video can still create tags for new videos and edit tags for existing videos, and video tags will still provide an important signal used to surface relevant results when searching for videos.

We’re going to be making some corresponding changes to all versions of the YouTube Data API to mimic this behavior in API responses. Starting later today, August 28, on the staging server and September 4 on the production server, any time you get a video entry back from any API method, it will have an empty <media:keywords/> element. This is a valid response from the API that your application should already handle gracefully, since videos are not required to have any keywords to begin with.

The exception to this rule is when you make authenticated requests to the API, and you request a video entry that’s owned by the currently authorized user. In that scenario, you will get back a <media:keywords> element that contains the full list of tags for the video, and you can read, update, or remove those video tags using the standard API operations.

Important: If your application allows video owners to update the metadata of their videos, please ensure that you include the proper Authorization header for both read and write operations. Otherwise, you could accidentally return an empty list of video tags when retrieving an existing video, and end up overwriting the video’s tags if you update the metadata. Video tags continue to play an important role in helping viewers discover your videos when searching on YouTube.com or via the API, so if your application does support metadata editing, please make sure you allow owners to tag their videos properly.

Cheers,
—Jeffrey Posnick, YouTube API Team

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If you ever pay attention to your browser’s location bar, you may have noticed that, for a while now, the YouTube.com website has used playlist IDs that are prefixed with the characters “PL” when constructing the URLs for playlist pages. http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL72CF07D200AA2AFA is one example of that. This practice of prepended playlist IDs previously didn’t extend over to the Data API—PL72CF07D200AA2AFA would not have been recognized as a valid playlist ID, but 72CF07D200AA2AFA would have.

Starting later today, Wednesday, August 22, the YouTube Data API will accept playlist IDs with the “PL” prefix whenever they’re used as metadata or in API request URLs. In most responses, the API will return playlist IDs with “PL” prefixes. The one exception is that for the next few days, searching for playlists will return playlist ids without the “PL” prefix. This will change on Tuesday, August 28, at which point the “PL” prefix will be included in playlist search results as well.

While we will continue to support using unprefixed playlist IDs as metadata or in API request URLs for the time being, at some point in the future we may require the “PL” prefix to be used whenever a playlist ID is provided. We’ll provide additional guidance if we do decide to stop supporting requests with unprefixed playlist IDs.

This change should be backwards compatible, but if you’re currently manipulating or comparing the playlist IDs that are returned via the API in any way, or making any assumptions about the length of the ID (which you shouldn't be), please make sure that your code will handle IDs that contain the “PL” prefix.

If you have any questions about this changes, please let us know in our developer forum.

Cheers,
—Jeffrey Posnick, YouTube API Team

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When Google+ first came out, we were really excited about the idea of writing some open source code to showcase how you could integrate YouTube with Google+. After some brainstorming, we came up with the idea of letting people collaboratively edit a playlist in realtime, and we started hacking!

We started working on Party Playlist Picker in early 2011. We’ve always wanted to release our experiment as an open source project, and you can now download the code to see one example of integrating Google+ functionality to enrich a YouTube application.

Party Playlist Picker is a Google App Engine application written in Python. It uses a Google+ share button so that partygoers can invite their friends to come edit a playlist in realtime. That feature is based on the Google App Engine channel API. It makes use of the gdata-python-client library to talk to YouTube and the google-api-python-client library to talk to Google+. It’s currently using version 1 of the YouTube API (because that’s what gdata-python-client uses), and we used OAuth 2 for authentication. In fact, we made good use of the Python client library to manage the OAuth 2 tokens for us automatically.

There’s also a lot of jQuery-based JavaScript goodness. For instance, you can search for videos without reloading the page, and you can simply drag them to add them to the playlist. If multiple people edit the page at the same time, the list of videos is updated in realtime whenever a change is made. You can also watch videos right on the page. Last of all, it keeps track of who’s edited the playlist, and whether they’re currently editing it.

There are a bunch of subtle HTML5 tricks thrown in as well. For instance, the application supports voice search, and we made a clever use of gradients to fade overflow text in the video descriptions.

Here’s a screenshot of the application:

If you’re interested in learning more, you can play around with a running version of it, or you can download the source code and hack away! If you have any questions, post them to our developer forum.

Update: Watch JJ, Jeff, and Danny Hermes (from the App Engine Developer Relations team) talk about Party Playlist Picker as part of YouTube Developers Live:


Cheers,
--Shannon -jj Behrens and Jeffrey Posnick, YouTube API Team