I’m working with the YouTube API and received an XML response that contains a date field. I’m confused about what this specific date represents in the context of the API response.
Could someone explain what this timestamp indicates? Does it show when the user was last active on their account, or does it refer to something else entirely? I need to understand this for my application logic.
YouTube’s XML feed timestamps are tricky - they act differently depending on which endpoint you hit. Channel feeds show the published date as the original upload time (this never changes). But updated doesn’t refresh right away when metadata changes - I’ve seen delays of several hours.
Watch out for livestreams and premieres though. The published timestamp might show the scheduled time instead of when it actually went live. Everything comes back in UTC too, so don’t forget timezone conversions. I learned that one the hard way when my app showed wrong dates to users in different timezones.
yep, so the published date is when the video was uploaded, while updated indicates any edits or changes done later. it’s more about the vid itself and not related to user activity. hope this helps!
Those XML timestamps track content changes, not user activity. The published field shows when the video was first uploaded - it never changes after that. The updated timestamp gets refreshed whenever someone edits the video’s metadata like the title, description, thumbnail, or privacy settings. Neither one tells you anything about when users logged in or how they’re engaging with the account. For your app logic, treat published as permanent and use updated to see when content was last modified. This matters if you’re caching data or need to detect changes.