Google Feeds API

Niall's reverse engineering of Google's feeds API is a fantastic scoop. A few quick responses:

• Developing the API first and the apps later puts Mobile developers on equal footing.


• The #1 feature that I want RIGHT NOW is to sync my NetNewsWire subscriptions with my Google Reader subscriptions. Google Reader has been the near-perfect complement to NetNewsWire for me - since I will eventually return to NNW I won't miss a post, but I can still keep reasonably up to date when I'm away from a Mac. NewsGator subscriptions for NetNewsWire readers were rumored, but still haven't been delivered.


• Love, love, love the conversion to valid Atom 1.0 feeds. That Unicode headache you had in your home grown feed reading/publish app? It's gone, or at least different. But hopefully it's gone.


• Love, love, love, LOVE the subscription list in Atom 1.0 Here's my google reader subscriptions list.


• I really hope there's no security problems with sharing google "_USER_ID"s between apps. If there is, it will effectively kill the ability of third-party apps to develop on top of the google feeds API.


• This brings up another point - some of what google knows about me I WANT shared. What Blogger blogs I write, what I upload to Google base, some (but not all) of my google search history, and so on. Will I get to control that? No other API does this. For instance, I can't not let you subscribe to my flickr feed, nor can I constrain what shows up in it.


• If they allowed me to selectively share and cross-reference my feeds with my search history, then we'd really be getting somewhere.


• Google is going to win the API "war" with a thousand little APIs, rather than one big one.

More later. I'm kind of surprised how excited I am about this.