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.