Introducing the Open Media Profile

Today, we’re happy to introduce the Open Media Profile. Just looking for highlights? Here you go:

• Open Media Profile is an OpenSearch profile based on Media RSS.
• Vox will support Open Media Profile as well as GData API
• It’s pretty cool to support APIs and formats that have been led by Amazon/A9, Yahoo, and Google in a way that anybody can use

Open Media Profile is a new name, but it represents an old idea. Let’s start with some background.

Tim O’Reilly says that in the Web 2.0 world, data is the Intel Inside. Almost every site offers feeds or APIs to get your data out, but that’s only half the problem — what if you need to pull your data in to an application?

With the launch of Vox, bloggers have wanted to include data from all their other services, like Flickr, YouTube, iFilm, PhotoBucket, and many more. But it doesn’t make sense to reinvent the wheel or create a proprietary API for this feature. It should just be present for any service that wants to make use of it.

To solve the problem, we’ve created the Open Media Profile. It’s based on the Amazon A9 team’s work in leading the OpenSearch community, along with Yahoo’s work in leading the Media RSS community, and Google’s work in creating the GData set of APIs. While we’re proud to integrate all these technologies, we should point out how much we’re not inventing. In many ways, this is a mash-up of many of the most popular APIs on the web.

Now all you need to do is see the spec. Check out the Open Media Profile for Open Search spec, and let us know what you think.