Google announces new AJAX Feed API
The Google AJAX API team has announced a genuinely useful Feed API that gives an Ajax developer the ability to access feeds, cached in the fast Google edge cache where appropriate, from across the web using a simple JavaScript API.
Context & Ripple Effects
The announcement lands sixteen months after Niall Kennedy broke word of Google's plan to offer a feed API in December 2005, alongside early documentation of the Google Reader API — so the idea has been circulating since before the current Ajax widget boom took shape. What ships today is the browser-native version: a JavaScript API that sidesteps the same-origin restriction entirely by serving cross-site feeds through Google's own edge cache.
It also marks a clear pivot in Google's developer-platform posture. In December 2006 the company shut down its long-running Search API, killing its flagship server-to-server interface; the Feed API replaces that model with code that runs inside third-party pages on Google-hosted infrastructure.
First-order effects
- Ajax developers gain a one-line way to fetch and render feeds from any domain inside a web page — previously this required a server-side proxy, so mashups and feed widgets get materially cheaper to build.
Second-order effects
- Publishers whose feeds get pulled through Google's cache lose direct visibility into who is reading them — request logs, referrer data and ad impressions shift behind a Google intermediary.
- Widget and gadget platforms competing for the same developer mindshare now face pressure to match a free, cached, zero-infrastructure client-side option or watch feed-based widgets consolidate around Google's endpoint.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — retire server APIs, replace them with browser-embedded services on Google infrastructure — the company positions itself as the default pipe between websites and third-party content, with caching, attribution and rate control concentrated at Google rather than at either end of the exchange.
The trend: Google is rebuilding its developer platform around JavaScript embedded in third-party pages running on its own edge infrastructure, displacing the server-to-server API model it abandoned with the Search API shutdown.