Here’s wishing all our uber-readers a happy, prosperous and peaceful 2006.

Syntagma Media is grateful for your patronage in the short time we’ve been around, and look forward to your company in the New Year.

Technorati’s Community Manager, Niall Kennedy, has broken confirmed news that Google plans to offer a 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.”

This will plug a gap in Googleland, allowing them to challenge feed-leader NewsGator: “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.”

Microsoft’s Robert Scoble, who has been urging Gates, Ballmer and Ozzie to buy NewsGator for a while, hammers the message home yet again: “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.”

* Abbreviation of application program interface, a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications. A good API makes it easier to develop a program by providing all the building blocks. A programmer puts the blocks together.

Google Future Watch is closing down for 7 days and will be back on Wednesday 28th. Urgent enquiries should be addressed to the email given in the sidebar.

All Syntagma Media blogs will be post-free until the same date. Some maintenance and enhancements will be carried out during this period, and our 9th blog, Vista Office, will be launched on the 28th.

In the meantime, have a very merry Christmas, Winter Solstice (Thursday), or whichever festival you celebrate at this time of year.

John Evans
Syntagma Media
Blog Network.

Reports suggest that Google has taken a 5 percent stake in AOL for $1bn. Previously, Microsoft had seemed favourite to cut a deal on paid advertising at least, despite seeing its offer of a merger between the portal and MSN rejected as too complicated.

Later reports intimated that Microsoft was proposing an arrangement to use the Time Warner company’s ad serving capability to boost its position in paid search. But Google, which already provides search services to AOL, beat Redmond to the punch.

John Battelle, whose recent book on Google, The Search, is reviewed here, has an intriguing surmise on why the search leader has put $1bn into AOL:

Why invest $1 billion in AOL? Well, should AOL go public, Google stands to profit ~ a lot. The company knows that by guaranteeing its business to AOL for the foreseeable future, it has in essence guaranteed AOL’s bottom line, providing a healthy earnings forecast for AOL and Wall St., should Time Warner decide to spin its erstwhile child back out as an independent public company.

What though are the chances of an AOL flotation? “My conversations with AOL execs lead me to believe the answer is yes, as long as the numbers look good. This Google deal takes care of that … and why would Google invest in a subsidiary of Time Warner, unless they were promised some kind of liquidity event?”

Game set and match to Google, it seems.