AOL Opens Video Search Engine to Developers

mytrip writes to tell us CNet is reporting that AOL has opened up their video search engine to developers. This push is being made in the hopes that it will drive more websites into using their service. From the article: "The goal for the APIs is different than the one that AOL had in mind when it opened up a number of its other applications to developers — notably its instant-messaging client AIM and IP telephony service AIM Phoneline. The AIM and AIM Phoneline toolkits were designed to enable modifications to the existing software, whereas the purpose of the new video-search APIs is to spread its video search engine to sites other than AOL."

Comments

After all the open your code and we fix it

[Timesprout]

I cant wait to see the rush of comits here

Re:After all the open your code and we fix it

[Frosty Piss]

open your code and we fix it

Isn't that what all the Open Source cheering squad advertises? All those "eyes" and all that? Can't complain about it now, the genie's out of the bottle.

Re:After all the open your code and we fix it

[molarmass192]

They opened their API, not their code, even MS supplies their APIS. This is no more open than eBay's public dev APIs, Google Map's public APIs, or Amazon's public APIs. I don't seem to recall any Open ***API*** "cheering squad" or movement.

Re:After all the open your code and we fix it

[Anonymous Coward]

Yap, yap, yap yap... Go eat your granola and cheetos, and quit "touching" yourself, it's disgusting.

Just what I wanted

[Somatic]

More ways to use AOL services! It's kind of like being given different ways to stab yourself in the eye.

Re:Just what I wanted

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a good thing I read this, I couldn't remember whether we were opposed to AOL this week or happy they existed (for our grandparents and such).

Re:Just what I wanted

[Anonymous Coward]

itsatrap!

Re:Just what I wanted

[__aaclcg7560]

This is better than getting a floppy/CD/DVD or whatever the hell they been sending out every week. At least, they're handing out services instead of fruit cake.

Re:Just what I wanted

[LindseyJ]

You misspelled 'coasters and frisbees' ;)

Re:Just what I wanted

[The Great Pretender]

AOL is still in service? I haven't had a CD from them in a good year or two. I thought they'd been run out of business or sold off.

Re:Just what I wanted

[TheSeer2]

I pay a hobo $5 a month to keep the CDs for me. Top quality service!

I wanna see...

[beckerist]

I wanna see a program (I can't imagine it'd be in anything but Flash, at least given today's technology) that actually grabs words and basic content material from a video, and auto-tags it. Until then, a "video search engine" is really only a "video tag search engine."

Re:I wanna see...

[mctk]

Even then it would only be a "video text search engine". What we really need is a program that records you on your webcam acting out a scene, then searches for a video containing that content.

"How did that video go?" (kicks friend in groin) "Oh here it is!"

Re:I wanna see...

[beckerist]

basic content material

Can you kindly enlighten me on how one would act out a carburetor? How about the WTC?

The burning question: how would one act out pr0n if, well, they need to look for it on the internet?

Wait a second... AOL has a video search?

[jsharkey]

Wait a second... AOL has a video search?

I don't know about anyone else but...

[Modeski]

Personally I wouldn't want to be associated with AOL in any way, shape or form.

Call for a boycott

[Anonymous Coward]

I boycott AOL.

I do not use AOL Instant Messenger.

I do not use AOL Search Enhanced By Google.

Furthermore to the aforementioned three boycotts I will not tolerate any Free/Libre Open Source Software software that has been touched by any developer that has worked on any application designed to interact with any AOL product or service.

I also announce the creation of a blog, a Wikipedia entry, and an Internet petition drive targeted at all such developers. If you associate yourself with AOL in any way, you will be banned.

Re:Call for a boycott

[LindseyJ]

Nobody expects the OSS inquisition!

Re:Call for a boycott

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the FL/OSS inquisition, you ignorant sow!

That's it! You're on the list! BOYCOTT!

Re:Call for a boycott

[AlgorithMan]

no, it's the F/LOSS inquisition, YOU ignorant sow!

That's it! You're on the list, too! BOYCOTT!

Re:Call for a boycott

[SirTalon42]

Good for you, I'm sure you, little Mr. AC, is very respected in the free/libre open source community.

Also if we associate ourselves with AOL in anyway we will be banned from what? Your blog? The internet petition? (Petition to do what anyways, boycott AOL?) The wikipedia entry (not a chance)?

Also why is AOL so special in getting your boycott?

I wouldn't be surprised if you've never contributed to a single FLOSS project.

Re:FP

[Anonymous Coward]

Critical Fail lol

AOL has some real hurdles

[mcrbids]

AOL has spent its karma. They're on a strong, downward spiral. This in spite of the fact that one of the largest, coolest things to come out was largely funded by them. (Mozilla) Here's what they need to do to get back on track:

1) Fire everybody in marketing. Re-hire a whole new marketing arm from the likes of Earthlink.

2) Retrain their call support centers. Make it possible to quit AOL.

3) Make a new corporate motto "don't be evil". Follow it. (Google seems to be weakening its resolve)

4) Hire a bunch of highly qualified engineers, let them play, and let them decide what to sell.

If they do the above, they have a ghost of a chance. If they don't, they're fodder for a buy out within another year or two. They might do OK if they merge with the likes of Earthlink - but not as equals. Only where Earthlink takes control and they do it the right way.

Re:AOL has some real hurdles

[Anonymous Coward]

AOL is not going to get bought out. seriously. you think TW will splooge on that?

Re:AOL has some real hurdles

[mcrbids]

AOL "splooge"d all over TW. Take a look at the stock price, sometime. Poor Ted Turner. It's not as though the warning signs haven't been all over the place

They'd do much better apart than together. Seriously, T/W cable is all over the freaking place - why isn't AOL involved?

Re:AOL has some real hurdles

[MosesJones]

Spent their Karma? AOL has NEVER been cool, AOLer was not a term of endearment went they first hit the internet, I was stunned in the mid 90s that people would pay AOL money to get on the internet. AOL is a marketing company their engineering has never been strong. Giving the keys to the asylum to a bunch of engineers is not going to help a company that is aimed at the mass market.

If AOL wants to survive they need to concentrate on brand, and what they say they offer, rather than trying to compete with what others offer. Its a sad fact but when aiming at the mass market having the best product is almost a sure way to fail.

Fodder for a buy out? You mean sell off I assume as they are currently merged with Time Warner.

Re:AOL has some real hurdles

[John Bokma]

"1) Fire everybody in marketing. Re-hire a whole new marketing arm from the likes of Earthlink." As in: when you receive spam, bother the faked sender? "3) Make a new corporate motto "don't be evil". Follow it. (Google seems to be weakening its resolve)" A company that's not evil doesn't need such a motto (customers are not that dumb), hence the reason why Google is weakening it, and probably keep doing it.

Re:AOL has some real hurdles

[Anonymous Coward]

Because of corporate infighting, they were frozen out of advertising services or being the ISP for TW Cable. Which is why Roadrunner still exists at all. Most recently, TW prevented AOL from marketing their VoIP solution, since TW Cable had one they wanted to sell. TW just wanted AOL to help pay the huge TW debt down. I love how they whine about what AOL "did to them".

This is no way to run a business.

Re:AOL has some real hurdles

[cubicledrone]

that is aimed at the mass market

Unless you're selling detergent, there is no mass market. The invention of the first search engine forever rendered the mass market obsolete.

Re:AOL has some real hurdles

[cubicledrone]

Because of corporate infighting

The chief cause of just about 90%+ of the problems in business today: middle management.

Re:AOL has some real hurdles

[wfberg]

When AOL partly funded mozilla, it was already in its downward spiral. AOL was never a great company, but it was at one time a fucking huge company worth bajillions on the stock market.

Up until the dotcom hype, AOLs businessmodel was pretty simple; you sell a subscription service that is slightly (but not vastly) expensive. Obviously, to maximize profits from subscriptions (and to make sure you don't suddenly lose 50% of your income from one month to the next) you have to make it hard for people to quit, and easy to signup (hence the AOL coasters that you got in the mail, magazines, etc.)

It's a fairly straightforward business; you provide a simple service and try not to annoy people so much that it seems worth their time to jump through the hoops to cancel their subscription. Much like bland, unadventurous magazines and newspapers - their contents is maybe 10% useful and the rest is filler, but they stay clear of printing too much gore or "incest - how to?" columns. And they flood you with those subscription inserts.

Then the dotcom hype happened, which meant that AOL was now worth bajillions based on basically it's name. "America" - can't go wrong there, you don't want to invest in Lithuania, and "Online", well, that has dotcom written all over it.

In this period they did the stuff like fund mozilla, and buy the guys behind winamp (whose media player hasn't improved vastly, but their shoutcast streaming audio site is just how streaming audio should be).

Then, after the dotcom crash (and Time Warners (reverse)takeover of/merger with AOL) came the stark reality of post-dotcomhype business. Being an ISP is no longer a simple affair - with technlogies like cable (docsis 1.0, 2.0), (V)(H)(A)DSL (1/2+) being upgraded every two years, the death of dialup at the time where dialup had just become so ubiquitous that it's built into telephone exchanges; there's not much value in being an ISP (too much competition) and doing it right is hard. AOL had always been doing the ISP bit a bit halfheartedly, and even with TimeWarner on board, they found they can't really be a persuasive content company!

So, cut to present time, and AOL is trying its damn hardest to get away from being an ISP, and to be as much as Google and Yahoo as they can.

There's no reason they shouldn't be good at the things Yahoo and Google do. Except that they've sullied their brandname by sucking at everything they've ever done. And being mismanaged.

Opening up AIM and trying to get their video search on other people's sites is just recognizing a simple fact; their brand sucks. They desperately need people to use their services first, find out they're worth using, and then worry about reeling them into 'the AOL experience' (with AOL's ads) later.

AOL's best bet would be to start doing stuff under different brand names, if possible to set up small companies with just a few people, with a start-up kind of atmosphere, where they don't have to bother much about tying into AOL's infrastructure (and management structure) beyond perhaps using AIM screennames as some sort of single sign on mechanism.

Re:AOL has some real hurdles

[moqi]

you speak quite highly of earthlink.

i was a customer of earthlink for my dsl service for about 3 years. even though they had capped my bandwidth to half of what it was from my previous provider [down to 50KB/sec up/down from 100KB/sec] i thought their service was pretty good. consistant speeds, good latency. there were some periodic downtimes that were unexplained, most of which fixed themself after a day.

i enjoyed their service until this year. my dsl stopped working, i figured it was one of the periodic downtimes, so i waited. a day went by, it still didn't work. a week went by. i called their tech support. they told me my network cables were bad. ok, so i go out and by another. it still doesn't work. i call again, this time they tell me my drivers must be corrupted. ok, so i download the latest from the manufacturer, uninstall, and reinstall. it still doesn't work. i call again, this time the guy tells me that my modem doesn't exist. haha, nice one. so after 30 or so minutes of him fumbling around through whatever manuals or documentation he has he comes to the conclusion that my network card is bad. erm ok... so i buy another, uninstall the old one, and install the new one. wouldn't you know it... it still doesn't work. a month has gone by at this point, and i call up again and ask to talk to their senior tech support guys. this time it wasn't the outsourced indians, it was actually someone here in the usa. of course he goes thru the normal crap of cables being connected and all that garbage, then procedes to look through his information. it turns out uu.net was no longer partnering with earthlink, which was preventing me from accessing the dsl service i paid for.

one whole month of calling their 'tech support' to find out they didn't even bother to notify me that they changed local partners. i didn't see any notice on their website, nor any emails sent to me about this. one would think that if such an event would occur, the isp would know about it in advance, and notify their customers in order to keep downtime to a minimum, yes? apparently that's not how earthlink rolls. they never even bothered to credit my account from the month they charged me that i couldn't possibly use, which they said they would.

i will never use earthlink again.

Re:AOL has some real hurdles

[Ilgaz]

They moved Netscape.net mail owners to AIM mail, promising a more modern interface with server features such as IMAP.

I have logged into Netscape a bit later to see what is new. They really did some cool stuff, Flash/AJAX like dynamic stuff which is more like the new Yahoo mail beta. It supports IMAP (including SSL IMAP) unlike Yahoo who doesn't support even if you pay them. Their SMTP is TLS encrypted etc. too.

More important of all, it supports OS X Safari which Yahoo beta doesn't.

As their new method of doing things, they opened a forum and blog. Guess what? It is full of Netscape.net mail users, yes that old simple and zero spam control thing PROTESTING AOL because of the move.

Don't misunderstand, lets say if you have mcbrids@netscape.net e-mail, that mail stays. They don't force people to have aol.com/aim.com e-mail which has disgusting image. They just can't stand to "AOL" word at the site/domain!

They move people to IMAP based, very modern and all browsers supported webmail system, give them 2 GB for free and yet people want their old technology netscape.net mail system back. Just because of the "AOL"' word. Just imagine the feedback if Google and Yahoo offered free IMAP with all browser compatible flash interface even with SSL. I am sure their sites would get slashdotted first time in history because of people opening accounts.

At least we now have good ammo against Google and Yahoo, we should use arguments like "Even AOL supports IMAP!" to fix their non explainable obsession with POP3. ;)

Re:AOL has some real hurdles

[Anonymous Coward]

they never even bothered to credit my account from the month they charged me that i couldn't possibly use, which they said they would.

A small claims suit could fix that.

Has blinkx got there first?

[BigBadBus]

Shame its made by these shits, its rather good.

Aooogle.org

[Anonymous Coward]

All AOL needs to do to win me back would create a hybrid car averaging 100mpg and fueled by free-trial CDs. I've got a stack in the closet that could get me to the moon and back.

AOL video what this Hi-Q software, why not flash

[davro]

For AOL video.

You need Internet Explorer 6.0 to download and watch Hi-Q Video content.
Support for Netscape browsers is not currently available. Support for Firefox browsers is coming soon.
Ha just load more hoops for people to jump though, im giving the dodgy software a wide birth.

API Account... Why?

[rHBa]

According to AOL:

"To gain access to the AOL Video Search AJAX API, you must first set up an API account."

They then give you a member ID to use when instantiating their remotely hosted js class.

Now why would I want/need to do that (set up an API account) when they have supplied a working example of the API with a working membership number. So what's to stop me just using *that* membership number in the handshake?

They'll change the membership number in the example? Well it's easy to scrape the latest version, from their website. It's even enclosed in an easy to regexp method call. The scraping could be done with AJAX as well when the page is loaded meaning the membership id is always current.

The example membership id has limited access to data? Well I'll wait for someone else to set up a fully featured "account" and use their member id.

Re:API Account... Why?

[slashkitty]

Each member id is limited to 10k requests per day. Get your own id.