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YouTube RSS Glitch

By Rob Safuto on Nov 16, 2006 in RSS, Social Media, Video Blogging | Tags: , , ,

Now that YouTube has been fully acquired by Google I think they should aspire to a high level of service. After all they’re no longer a cash strapped startup anymore. Heck, in terms of internet startups they are now filthy rich. So they should have the money to make their feature set a bit more reliable.

I recently decided to be very social and create a channel on YouTube for Blubrry called U See Blu. The purpose of the channel is to syndicate training screencasts and videos from events as well as collecting other Blubrry related videos that can be found on YouTube. A noble effort if I do say so myself.

Once I created the channel and added some content my next thought was to syndicate the channel using the RSS features provided by YouTube. Since YouTube does not do you the favor of providing an RSS link in your channel page I had to dig into their help pages to find their RSS syndication primer.

I followed their instructions to build the following RSS link: feed://www.youtube.com/rss/blubrrypodcasting/youtube/videos.rss. I check the results of the feed and voila, nothing!

Now I know that when I initially configured the channel that the rss was working. But I went to first use the feed right after the close of the Google acquisition. I see that the RSS for tags and site level feeds still works.

So my questions are these. Is this just a temporary glitch? Or did the close of the Google deal mean the end of user level RSS within the YouTube community?

Given the potential copyright lawsuits related to syndicating unauthorized content and Google’s known aversion to supporting RSS, it’s possible that the latter statement is true. I hope not. This would be a big step back for YouTube as a social platform for the video blogging community.

[tags]Social Media, Video Blogging, YouTube, Google, RSS[/tags]

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RSS Feed for This Post3 Comment(s)

  1. Stelabouras | Feb 14, 2007 | Reply

    I think that you have something wrong with the generated feed url of yours. The right one is
    http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/blubrrypodcasting/videos.rss

  2. Rob Safuto | Feb 14, 2007 | Reply

    Looks like you’re right. I’ve been meaning to check back to see what they were doing with RSS. I was just looking at the help section again and they certainly don’t make it easy for users to find that feed address.

  3. Stelabouras | Feb 15, 2007 | Reply

    Ye you are right, but with a little search you can find them ;)

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