Saw this post from Niall Kennedy quite a bit earlier but kind of passed over it because it was of the ‘coming soon’ variety.

I’m trying to write less on ‘coming soon’ and write about more stuff here in the now (plenty of both to write about frankly), but then I read the comments of this post closer this afternoon and saw that this had been confirmed by Google engineer, Chris Wetherall and Jason Shellen, Google Reader Project Manager.

Mr. Wetherall writes:

So developers should note that some of the URLs might still change but that we’re getting close to stability and we’re happy for anyone to build atop the framework who is interested (and doesn’t find managing auth issues daunting) as that’s been our goal and intent with the API for Reader.

If you add these comments to what Niall wrote in the post it definitely makes this situation more interesting for developers rolling their own aggregators:

Google and its team of engineers and server clusters can handle the hard work of understanding feeds in various formats and states of validation, allowing developers to focus on the interaction experience and other differentiating features. You can also retrieve and synchronize feed subscription lists with an established user base that could be in the millions, providing a better experience for users on multiple devices and platforms.

Intriguing. It’s been awhile since I originally checked out Google Reader (October 7, 2005) so I browsed over there this evening to see how things are coming along.

I took a somewhat recent OPML reading list — nearly 400 feeds — and imported using Internet Explorer. It took about 10 seconds to suck in the list and change from please wait to “the page will refresh shortly.” This page changed in another minute and then there was a wait while the browser attempted to load all the feeds.

Waiting.

Admittedly, most folks using Google Reader don’t have 400 feeds so this is might be an unfair test, but that is what I have as of this writing so if Google Reader were to be useful to me then it would need to service at least these number of feeds.

Ten minutes. Still loading. Decided to see if Reader worked in Opera yet because it had some problems the first time around (see October post linked above). I noticed they had the title issue resolved and all titles seemed to be showing. I wasn’t seeing any images however.

Within a few minutes I saw a story I might like to write about in greater detail and chose “Gmail this” from the dropdown menu. That popped a window where I could easily send the story. I chose to send to my own gmail account with a tagged +blogthis so that I could setup a new label for stories I might want to blog later.

There’s also a “blog this” choice which will popup a window to blog inside your blogger account. Now if only they had a generic metaweblog API so it could hook into other blogging scripts like Movable Type and Wordpress this could be more useful.

Then I was reminded of the API mentioned above that is coming soon and saw a future with this functionality being added by a third party developer. This is one of the cool parts of APIs in that you won’t get locked into choices by one vendor. MSN Spaces recently supporting the MetaWeblog API means that it isn’t necessary to use only the MSN Spaces interface to post to that blog. I really like this aspect of APIs from both the user and developer perspective.

As for Internet Explorer? Still was loading after some 30 minutes (why didn’t the browser ever timeout?). I decided to stop the process and reload the page. It seemed to work but when I clicked on the “Your Subscriptions” link the only feed that showed up was Hmm which was already there before the import. However, individual blog entries from many sources were showing below.

Google Reader is still not ready for users with hundreds of subscriptions, but it is definitely improving. By rolling out a Google Reader API in the future officially they just might make it possible for a third party to make a better aggregator than them.

Welcome to the web at the end of 2005.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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