GOOGLE WOULD LIKE to think that people click the share function on Google Reader as one of the pre-eminent ways of passing along the news. People using microblogs like Jaiku, Twitter and Pownce think that pointing to links is the way information gets passed around. On several Irish mailing lists, conversations kick off more often in reaction to a public event, product show or major flaw in a service. In all of these cases, newsfeeds are not the primary spark of things that generate cross-talk. This simple fact--the lack of a single font of knowledge--could be one of the reasons the Google Reader team plans to integrate more social features into Reader. Similar to the logic behind Nokia's Ovi, Google's Reader team wants to collect and then share out details such as reading lists, a new service called “Activity Streams” (code named Mocha Mocha) as well as new ways to monetize feeds by tapping into Reader. Although the Google team have copped onto the importance of being able to automatically tag content in shared videos, they do not appear to rank shared photos or shared audio with the same degree of importance. That's an important consideration, as we will discuss during Podcamp Ireland.
In a video leaked from Google Labs (now deleted), I learned some interesting things.
Two-thirds of all feeds only have one subscriber.
Google polls for updates on vanity feeds (sites with few subscriptions) once every three hours, which is around twice as slow as the polling done by Jaiku and is three times as slow as polling done by paid services such as Zenark and FreeNews.
Google tries to poll popular feeds once an hour but won't return until an hour later for a slow-responding site.
The Google Reader database (BigTable) holds 10 TB of data from 8m newsfeeds.
Feedburner statistics say that Google Reader is the most popular feed reader on the planet, followed by My Yahoo. That's what my webstats say as well.
If the leaked video is legit, you should see Google Reader recommending newsfeeds that it thinks are relevant for you in the near future. Funnily enough, I would rather the machine (e.g., Google Reader) to automatically identify the feeds it thinks are wastes of my time and a drain on its storage space.
James Corbett -- "Google ReWriter is on the way"
Philipp Lenssen -- "Leaked Google Video Discusses Google Reader, Social Efforts"
Duncan Riley -- "Google May Add Comment Feature on Shared Reader Feeds"
James Corbett -- "Google ReWriter is on the way (redux)"
