Zmarties

The new share feature in Google Reader has been noted in a few places, not least of which is on the main Google Reader Blog.

A brief but informative post at Persistent Info by Mihai who worked on the feature, gives a few key technical insights into the implementations. Key amongst these are the fact that

• the "put a clip on your site" feature is producing the data in JSON format - so although it is easiest to display it as styled by Google, it's also possible to use the data in a radically different form
• the feeds produced by Google Reader are in the Atom 1.0 format

Blogger has long used an obsolete Atom draft format, so its about time that they moved to the released spec. JSON is an interesting technology, and Google is in this instance behind Yahoo, who have offered JSON output via many of their APIs for a while now.

Update: It's also worth taking a look at Niall Kennedy's post where he reverse engineered the Google Reader API.

Update 2: Also very worthwhile seeing Tim Bray's comments on the Atom data they are outputting.