Google AJAX Feed API delays

When I tried to integrate the new plazes rss feed with blogger, my first approach was to used Google's AJAX Feed API. It's straightforward and you don't need to code a lot in order to read and use feed data.

The major problem of the Google's API, though, is a delay in updates. The feed you consume through the API will be fetched by Google's "Feedfetcher" infrequently, which means you'll get cached data if it hasn't been fetched for a while. The documentation states that the frequency of fetching feeds is "less than once every hour". My experience was, that it fetches feeds about every 6 hours. That's way to slow for a Twitter like behaviour.

The Google AJAX Feed API is also used for Google Reader, which is also kinda slow in updating feeds.