YouTube just added a rich YouTube API for developers, including a Javascript API for the player.

This is exciting because it enables some of the scenarios I discussed in hyperlinking to the good stuff in a web video:

People who embed videos on the web frequently tell their readers to fast forward to a specific point to get to the “good stuff”, for example here.

It’s dumb that readers have to do that manually. If Flash video players were slightly smarter, the author could create an easy-to-type hyperlink that would cause the embedded video to skip to a specific section of the video and start playing.

Power users ought to be able to create their own “virtual edit” of a video by specifying a sequence of time segments to play back. A blogger might create their selection of highlights from the presidential debate to accompany their post, for example, without having to actually re-encode the video.