December 12, 2007

YouTube Channel Data Feed Slow to Update

Google AJAX Search API Blog: Direct Access to YouTube Channels

This is pretty cool feature just in time for StevensFive and the videos we are posting on our YouTube channel.

Update: the 'uploads' GData feed is working now and is no longer empty - probably just a provisioning delay

However, there are some discrepancies we have to work around currently. When we search using ytchannel:stevensfive we do not get any results. As this feature indicates it leverages YouTube Data APIs we looked there. Hitting our uploads data feed directly produces zero entries while our RSS feed is complete. Most of the data feeds seem coherent to the results from the user experience. It is just this feed which is empty. We will just have to use 'stevensfive' as a search term for now.

This "indexing latency" has been reported by others. Latency is expected, but the question is how much. StevensFive channel might be an edge case too because the channel was create a year ago but the first video was posted yesterday. We have been getting intermittent 500 errors on the YouTube site in last 24 hours (the ones which present an encoded blob back to the user) - maybe there are some stack traces out there for someone to look at which would explain why our data feed is empty.

(We had tried to post to the YouTube Data API Group but group joining is flaking out today).

No comments: