Google Reader Does It Again!

In a world full of feed readers, Google has once again raised the bar and (unfortunately) put another nail in the coffin for paid feed services.

The search engine king has announced a new feature for their Google Reader which many active bloggers, readers, or geeks with too much time on their hands will find useful for charting which topics they enjoy getting their daily fix from.

(Google Reader Blog) Playing around with these ideas, I created a simple Reader “trends” page, inspired by Google Trends as well as the Search History Trends page. After showing it to the rest of the Reader team and a few other interested Googlers, I began to gather feedback and implemented it. […]

The result is the Reader Trends page, accessed via a link from the “Home” page. For example, it lets me see the spike in read items two days ago (the result of my New Year’s resolution of staying on top of my 322 subscriptions).

What makes Reader Trends great is the fact that aspiring and professional bloggers can track how well (and often) they read on certain topics, as well as helpfully eliminate feeds that they are barely touching on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

With Google raising the bar for feed readers everywhere, I wonder whether or not Bloglines, other online readers and desktop readers (they still exist?) will be able to compete in the future?

Author: Darnell Clayton

Darnell Clayton is a geek who discovered blogging long before he heard of the word “blog” (he called them “web journals” then).

When he is not tweeting, friendfeeding, or blogging about space, he enjoys running, reading and describing himself in third person.