StreamFist.com no longer exists, but its technology propelled me into a ton of new ideas and abilities.

The goal behind StreamFist was to pull YouTube video playlists into a never-ending stream of media, presented in full screen, effectively turning the computer monitor into a television. But unlike a television, with StreamFist, the user completely controls the content.

Furthermore, it was during this project that I learned about APIs. When I originally built it, I hadn’t yet encountered an API (Application Programming Interface)–I had never even heard of one. So instead of using YouTube’s wonderful, well-documented and robust API, I wrote a program that followed links into YouTube’s actual HTML pages–what the browser would see–and parsed out HTML for the necessary IDs.

It was extremely renegade and broke often, but it proved useful. This was evident when I reached out to SoulGarden.tv and began a collaborative relationship that still exists today. It was further evident when I went to bed one night with about 10 playlists added by myself and a few users and woke up with about 100 new playlists contributed by Anonymous, the activist group, all footage of protests and mini-documentaries about Scientology. I was mostly just trying to stream the four parts of Phantom of the Paradise that I found broken up on YouTube–but hey, I was honored.

Months later I found myself in NY working on the next version of StreamFist. But by this time I had vastly improved my PHP skills and I wrote this next incarnation with YouTube’s API. I do intend to re-release this project, but I’m not sure exactly when…