Google announces feed API
Niall Kennedy, of Technorati, has the news that Google will release a feed API in early 2006. — Here's another note to Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Ray Ozzie. Hey, I asked you guys to acquire NewsGator three months ago. If you had done that you would have taken the wind out of Google's sails.
Context & Ripple Effects
Niall Kennedy's exclusive on Google's planned feed API lands the same day as his follow-up on the Google Reader API specifics: third-party developers building new views of feed data on Google's backend, with synchronization, tagging, and read/unread status handled server-side. That makes Reader less an end product than a syndication platform built on AJAX and Atom.
The frame is openly competitive: the Microsoft Geek Blogger uses the announcement to needle Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Ray Ozzie over not acquiring NewsGator three months earlier, arguing a deal would have blunted Google's move — this right after Ozzie's year-end message declaring 2006 the Year of Build for Microsoft.
First-order effects
- Independent developers gain a free, hosted feed backend with sync and read-state management, letting them ship reader clients without building their own infrastructure.
- Commercial aggregator vendors like NewsGator now compete against Google giving away the hardest part of the stack — synchronized subscription state — at zero price.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft faces a fork its own bloggers are highlighting: answer with an acquisition such as NewsGator, or bet on Ozzie's Year-of-Build strategy of shipping competing services in-house during 2006.
- If client-side readers migrate to Google-hosted state, attention and usage data concentrate on Google's servers, weakening rivals' ability to sell sync as a paid feature.
Third-order effects
- Syndication shifts from a file format consumed by clients to a service where the API owner controls subscriptions, tags, and read state — making whoever hosts the sync layer the gatekeeper of the feed ecosystem.
- A pattern of web companies exposing internal application backends as public APIs hardens into standard practice for 2006, forcing every consumer web product to decide whether it is a destination or a platform.
The trend: Feed reading is moving from standalone desktop clients toward hosted platforms whose backends double as public APIs, with Google positioning itself as the default synchronization layer for the open syndication ecosystem.