Niall Kennedy of Technorati: Exclusive: Google to offer feed API: Google plans to offer a feed reader API to allow 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….Google’s new offering is direct competition to NewsGator’s synchronization APIs but are easier to code against (no SOAP required). Google currently does not have the same reach across devices as NewsGator but an easy-to-use API from the guys who brought you the Blogger API and “Blog This!” might really shake up the feed aggregator ecosystem.

Robert Scoble of Microsoft: Google announces feed API: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. But now that Google has a feed API, we’ll need one too and right now NewsGator looks pretty good

I was writing a tool that would have used Newsgator as a feed update service for Philly Future. Would have saved considerable bandwidth. Lets see where Google goes with this. Bloglines could and should release similar functionality. It would have been my first choice as a stable platform to build from if it were already available.