Google Reader Info Leaked In Google Training Video
A Google video about Google Reader shown to new Google employees (Nooglers) was accidentally briefly left public on Google Video, and a few people caught the video and are publishing details. “Fanboy” gave the Blogoscoped forum some details, and there are so many of them, but here are some that he lists:
- Google is working on ways for blog publishers to explain to feed readers what types of changes have been made to feed items (post deleted, post edited in a minor way). Presumably, this will be some sort of extension to the RSS spec, and a much needed one as any frequent RSS user will attest. Maybe they can work with Dave Winer on this one?
- 2/3 of feeds have only one subscriber. Some feeds have tens of millions of subscribers. Those with one subscriber are queried every three hours, those with more are checked every hour.
- Google has 10 terabytes of saved feed data from 8 million feeds, growing 4% every week. That means it doubles every 17 1/2 weeks and should reach 150 terabytes in 60 weeks.
- Google uses the BigTable database for feed storage, Mustang for feed search.
- Reader is going to integrate social features, including Activity Streams (a poorly named Facebook News Feed), comments on shared feed items.
- Google regrets the stupid decision to call tags “labels”, that it is “kind of a historic accident and needlessly confusing”.
- Google Universal Search has a required response time of 1/4 second. Any Google service that can’t meet that threshold, can’t be included in Universal Search.
- 3 people work on the Reader backend, three (plus an intern) on the frontend.
- Reader will add a feature where it recommends feeds for the user to subscribe to.
- Next week, Reader will be released in several languages, followed by 40 languages next month.
- Google Reader is #1, according to Feedburner stats. My Yahoo is number one for headlines. Usage of Bloglines has not declined as Reader became more popular.
- Reader has Google’s third most loyal userbase, after Gmail and Orkut.
- 70% of Reader user use Firefox.
- Reader might show ads, but show AdSense ads for AdSense publishers in the interface where appropriate.
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Reader, Culture, Products, General |
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