No more NewsGator, no Google Reader API

09 August, 2009

So everyone heard earlier this week that NewsGator is shutting down their aggregator synchronising service and getting everyone to switch to Google Reader.

There are two big problems for me:

Google Reader does not support authenticated feeds, NewsGator does
Google Reader does not have an officially documented API, NewsGator does

There are also other issues of course, like Google owning yet another piece of monopoly pie, but the others affect me more directly right now.

Both NetNewsWire and FeedDemon now have the ability to sync with Google Reader, but there’s no published API, so I can’t mirror their behaviour in my own Linux desktop aggregator. At best I could use Niall Kennedy’s work from 2005 or maybe code from pyrfeed which has some documentation from 2007. Neither is an option I would choose willingly.

Comments

Dirkjan Ochtman

10 August, 2009 at 08:48

Heh, you mirror my thoughts: http://twitter.com/djco/status/3162385438. There’s a thread in GReader support forums about adding support for authenticated feeds, maybe you could add your thoughts there?

Nate

14 September, 2009 at 16:17

Not sure if this is still an issue for you or not, but Google Reader supposedly has an undocumented API. Simply do a search for “Google Reader API”. I haven’t researched this much myself.

Phil

15 September, 2009 at 10:08

Yes indeed, and I’ve even used it, but an actual, documented API with client libraries (like the other Google apps) would be very welcome.