One interesting aspect about the web is that for every successful venture there is a myriad of others that pop up around it. Some are obvious copies, some just try to cash in on someone else’s success, but some actually provide a useful service extending the functionality of the original one. This is made easy by the APIs that many Internet services provide, some like Twitter making them a central piece of their strategy. The problem with APIs, though, is that when you depend on them, you’re basically at the mercy of the company behind them, as one startup using YouTube’s APIs, Totlol, found out and painfully so.
Totlol is a video site aimed at children. It uses videos from YouTube which are filtered and curated by the parents in order to provide the kids with content appropriate for their age. It managed to gain a decent following, but a change in the YouTube API Terms of Service (ToS) forced its creator, Ron Ilan, to shut down the free, ad-supported version of the site, and offer only a subscription-based one.
Now, Ilan is claiming that YouTube made the changes in direct response to his site and that Google’s intentions were clearly aimed at preventing Totlol from achieving too much success and potentially at YouTube launching a similar feature at some point. What’s more, he claims that this was a delibe… (read more)