Despite the news of Greg Isaacs' departure having been mentioned in several sites, this key eBay director's recent departure hasn't made the wire reports news. Isaacs announced his departure yesterday.

Who is Greg Isaacs, some of you might wonder? He's not on the big eBay's management list, after all. True. Greg Isaacs is, or rather was, the Director of the Developer Program at eBay.

Through AuctionBytes Blog, I found that Isaacs was mentioned in July 2006 in CNNMoney's Business 2.0 journal in the top 50 people who matter. The top ten names in the list include Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google's co-founders, Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO and Ray Ozzie of Microsoft. Then, in number 31, Greg Isaac is mentioned. Skype's co-founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, are ranked after him at number 36, just to give you an idea.

Greg Isaacs had managed to persuade eBay's management to allow outside developers access to eBay's database so that they could build tools and widgets around it. Already several startups have sprung up from the developer site.

If you haven't figured out the online video craze is in full tilt, it's time to get with the program. This is becoming the next "NEXT BIG THING," although if you are in the post-college or younger age group, it has been here for a long time. AOL now has launched its developer program on an open platform basis that will allow real-time submissions and search across AOL and third party platforms and video content owners.

This announcement will not have any significant positive or negative financial impact on any of the Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX) and AOL subsidiaries, but it is one of many focused core strategies that is getting the AOL name ready for the next move. Initiatives are ramping fast now and the company is really trying to show it can be just as nimble as the kids over at Google (GOOG) and as savvy as the competition at Yahoo! (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT).

AOL is essentially saying it will be there for the explosive growth in real-time video search. That may not sound as exciting as it is. If you don't recall how fast video can change public opinion, think back to "American Pie" and how a live video feed changed things. That was in a fictional story of course, but that was based on current technology for the year 1999. Digital video technology has come a long way, and the new video compression standards have only contributed more and more to the viral wave of video on the web. Imagine what happens when near real-time amateur video comes out when a politico makes a comment he or she thinks is off camera, and that is instantly available for the world to see.

Through its new AOL Video Search developer program, AOL has made available a set of open video search APIs (application programming interfaces) as well as implemented a system for video content owners to submit feeds to the AOL Video Search index through new AOL Director Accounts. The AOL Video Search Developer site can be found at http://developer.searchvideo.com.