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Developer's Guide: Data API Protocol – User Profiles

A user profile contains information about a user, such as the user's hobbies, occupation, or favorite books, music and movies. Any personal information that appears in a user profile feed will have been entered by that user for publication on YouTube. The YouTube Data API allows you to retrieve user profiles.

Retrieving a user's profile

This section explains how to retrieve an entry containing information about a specific user's profile.

  • To request the currently logged-in user's profile, send an HTTP GET request to the following URL. Note: For this request, you must provide an authentication token in the Authorization HTTP request header. The authentication token enables YouTube to identify the user.

    http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/default

  • To request another user's profile, send an HTTP GET request to the following URL. Note that this request does not require authentication.

    http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/username

    In the URL above, you must replace the text username with the user's YouTube username.

An API response to a request for a user profile contains a single <entry> tag. The profile entry contains the following information:

  • Several tags in the yt namespace identify personal information that the user added to his YouTube profile, such as his age, favorite books, occupation or school.

  • The <media:thumbnail> tag contains a picture that the user has uploaded to his profile or, if no such picture exists, a default image.

  • The <yt:statistics> tag contains statistics about the user, inlcuding the number of people who have viewed the user's profile, the number of videos the user has watched and the number of people who subscribe to the user's uploaded videos.

  • A series of <gd:feedLink> tags provide URLs for retrieving the user's uploaded videos, favorite videos, playlists, subscriptions and contacts.

The following XML shows a sample API response containing a user profile:


<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<entry xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom'
    xmlns:media='http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/'
    xmlns:batch='http://schemas.google.com/gdata/batch'
    xmlns:yt='http://gdata.youtube.com/schemas/2007'
    xmlns:gd='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005'
    gd:etag='W/&quot;DkMGRX47eCp7ImA9WxRQGU0.&quot;'>
  <id>tag:youtube,2008:user:andyland74</id>
  <published>2006-10-16T00:09:45.000-07:00</published>
  <updated>2008-02-26T11:48:21.000-08:00</updated>
  <category
    scheme='http://gdata.youtube.com/schemas/2007/channeltypes.cat'
    term='Standard'/>
  <category scheme='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#kind'
    term='http://gdata.youtube.com/schemas/2007#userProfile'/>
  <title type='text'>andyland74 Channel</title>
  <link rel='http://gdata.youtube.com/schemas/2007#featured-video'
    type='application/atom+xml'
    href='http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/PlVJ88-zqkI?v=2'/>
  <link rel='related' type='text/html'
    href='http://andyland74.example.com'/>
  <link rel='alternate' type='text/html'
    href='http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=andyland74'/>
  <link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml'
    href='http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/andyland74?v=2'/>
  <author>
    <name>andyland74</name>
    <uri>http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/andyland74</uri>
  </author>
  <yt:firstName>33</yt:firstName>
  <yt:lastName>33</yt:lastName>
  <yt:aboutMe></yt:aboutMe>
  <yt:age>33</yt:age>
  <yt:username>andyland74</yt:username>
  <yt:books>Catch-22</yt:books>
  <yt:gender>m</yt:gender>
  <yt:company>Google</yt:company>
  <yt:hobbies>Testing YouTube APIs</yt:hobbies>
  <yt:hometown>Philadelphia, PA</yt:hometown>
  <yt:location>Boston, MA 02043, US</yt:location>
  <yt:movies>Aqua Teen Hungerforce</yt:movies>
  <yt:music>Elliott Smith</yt:music>
  <yt:relationship>taken</yt:relationship>
  <yt:occupation>Technical Writer</yt:occupation>
  <yt:school>University of North Carolina</yt:school>
  <media:thumbnail url='http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YFbSxcdOL-w/default.jpg'/>
  <yt:statistics viewCount='9' videoWatchCount='21' subscriberCount='1'
    lastWebAccess='2008-02-25T16:03:38.000-08:00'/>
  <gd:feedLink rel='http://gdata.youtube.com/schemas/2007#user.favorites'
    href='http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/andyland74/favorites?v=2' countHint='4'/>
  <gd:feedLink rel='http://gdata.youtube.com/schemas/2007#user.contacts'
    href='http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/andyland74/contacts?v=2' countHint='1'/>
  <gd:feedLink rel='http://gdata.youtube.com/schemas/2007#user.inbox'
    href='http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/andyland74/inbox?v=2' countHint='0'/>
  <gd:feedLink rel='http://gdata.youtube.com/schemas/2007#user.playlists'
    href='http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/andyland74/playlists?v=2'/>
  <gd:feedLink rel='http://gdata.youtube.com/schemas/2007#user.subscriptions'
    href='http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/andyland74/subscriptions?v=2' countHint='4'/>
  <gd:feedLink rel='http://gdata.youtube.com/schemas/2007#user.uploads'
    href='http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/andyland74/uploads?v=2' countHint='1'/>
  <gd:feedLink
    rel='http://gdata.youtube.com/schemas/2007#user.newsubscriptionvideos'
    href='http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/users/andyland74/newsubscriptionvideos?v=2'/>
</entry>