Exclusive: Google to offer feed API
Google plans to offer a feed reader API to allow third-party developers to build new views of feed data on top of Google's backend. The new APIs will include synchronization, feed-level and item-level tagging, per-item read and unread status …
Context & Ripple Effects
Google is opening up Google Reader within days of launching Google Base, its free database for structured listings — a one-two punch that treats both feeds and listings as backend data others can build on. Reader already runs an AJAX/JavaScript front-end over Atom syndication data, so exposing an API formalizes what the interface was doing informally.
The plan, confirmed by multiple bloggers on December 27, 2005, calls for synchronization plus feed-level and item-level tagging and per-item read/unread status, targeting an early-2006 release. That feature list matters: it means Google wants to hold the canonical copy of what you have read and how you have organized it, with third-party clients as views on top.
First-order effects
- Third-party developers gain sanctioned access to Google's feed backend, letting them ship alternative readers and views without building their own crawling or storage layers.
- A user's tags and read/unread state become synchronized through Google rather than per-application, so switching clients stops resetting reading history.
Second-order effects
- Web-based feed aggregators must now compete against a free backend whose sync, tagging, and read-state plumbing they would each otherwise maintain themselves — or decide to build on top of Google instead of against it.
- Combined with Google Base and the analyst claim — unconfirmed — that Base plus vertical search and RSS could erode paid-access walled gardens, Google is assembling the ingestion side of a structured-content platform that pulls more publisher data behind its infrastructure.
Third-order effects
- If the early-2006 API ships as described, the pattern points toward consumer web apps becoming platforms: the differentiator shifts from having a reader to owning the read-state and tag graph everyone else's clients write to.
- Developer ecosystems forming around single-company backends foreshadow the platform-dependency questions — pricing, access terms, deprecation risk — that follow whenever one firm hosts an industry's shared data layer.
The trend: Consumer web services are turning their backends into developer platforms, with Google positioning feed aggregation — alongside Google Base's listings — as shared infrastructure that third-party clients rent views onto.