YouTube Contact Category Deprecation

[Jeffrey Posnick]

Until recently, YouTube (and the YouTube API) has allowed users to
associate a category—either “Friend” or “Family”—with their YouTube
contacts. However, this functionality has already been removed from
the YouTube web interface, and we want to let developers know that we
will be making corresponding changes to the YouTube API.

If your code specifies a category when adding (http://code.google.com/
apis/youtube/2.0/
developers_guide_protocol_contacts.html#Adding_a_contact) or updating
(http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/2.0/
developers_guide_protocol_contacts.html#Updating_a_contact) a YouTube
contact, that category will be effectively ignored. The request will
be treated as if the category value wasn’t specified at all, and this
will match what currently happens when a contact is added using the
YouTube web interface.

Similarly, when you retrieve (http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/2.0/
developers_guide_protocol_contacts.html#Retrieve_contacts) a user’s
contacts via the YouTube API, the contacts will not specify an
associated category.

We plan on implementing this change in behavior on Wednesday, June 22.
We apologize for the lack of advanced notice, but the desire to have
the YouTube API match the current behavior of the YouTube web
interface necessitated the short timeframe.

Cheers,
-Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team