Google will launch a feed reader API

This is a big revelation: Google is planning to release an API for reading RSS Feeds (the same API used for its Google Reader application) from third-party applications.

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 and the public access could be launched in the next months.

This new API will be extremely simple to use (no SOAP) and its flexibility is shown on this reverse-engineering analysis of the Google Reader backend. You could be able to build your own personal feed reader on top of Google Reader by using the correct calls to the application, for example:

  • Requesting a feed: http://www.google.com/reader/atom/feed/ + [Feed URL]
  • Subscription list: /reader/atom/user/[user id]/pref/com.google/subscriptions
  • Stream of unread entries across all subscribed feeds: /reader/atom/user[user id]/state/com.google/reading-list

(more details are on the previous link).

This news is extremely interesting, because we could be able to add feed capabilities to our applications in a simple manner. We'll see what happens!

Print | posted on Wednesday, December 28, 2005 9:04 AM

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