14 DAY TRIAL // The Google I/O 2010 developer conference is upon us and there are plenty of big announcements scheduled for the two-day conference, most of which we don’t know about. One new feature that Google has now confirmed after it inadvertently got out is the Google Feed API 2.0. The Feed API enables users to embed a syndicated feed on their website or blog or use it in another context. To utilize a popular phrasing, the update is the Feed API ‘on steroids’ with the addition of real-time feeds powered by PubSubHubbub.
RSS/Atom feeds that use PubSubHubbub, or PUSH for short, actively push any new content to the subscribers, ensuring that it gets to the destination within a few seconds of it being published. The technology was introduced last year and was a much-needed update to the aging but still very capable feed protocols.
The Google Feed API 2.0 will push it one step further, taking the PUSH-enabled feeds and publishing them to the sites with the embedded feature. A visitor to a site using the Feed API 1.0 would only see an update after it was published and distributed via the traditional means, something that used to take hours in some cases, and only after the page was refreshed. With the Feed API 2.0, updates show up as soon as they are available and published directly to the third-party site.
The release of the Google Feed API 2.0 was discovered via an unlisted YouTube video. YouTube has recently launched the ‘unlisted’ privacy option, which enables users to publish videos that are inaccessible by any other means than a direct link, but are otherwise unprotected. After the discovery was made, Google confirmed it and told Read Write Web that the new API was launching on the first day of the Google I/O 2010 conference. The video does a great job at explaining what the Google Feed API does and what the 2.0 version brings.