Update on Google Reader

Google plans to release a feed API very soon, as in the next month. Via Niall Kennedy’s blog: a feed reader API will let 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, as well as rich media enclosure and metadata handling.

Niall Kennedy reversed-engineered the Google Reader and then posted his findings. Then he received a phone call from Jason Shellen, PM of Google Reader, to let him know that Google built its feed API first and the Google Reader application second as a demonstration of what could be done with the underlying data.