Google Blogoscoped reported earlier today about a video which has been leaked from the Googleplex, claiming to be confidential and dubbed ‘Nooglers And The PDB: Reactor.’ The video was of a Google Reader team meeting and has since been removed, but the original tipper was wise to take some notes on some of the juicy details revealed.
The stats in the leaked video ranged from the fact that Google stores 10 terabytes of raw data from 8 million feeds, to that 2/3 of all feeds Google Reader users have subscribed to have only 1 subscriber – i.e. personal subscriptions — which are updated once every three hours. 70% of Google Reader users use Firefox, and Google Reader is third in terms of pageviews among Google Apps (following Orkut and Gmail for obvious reasons.)
And now for the juice, or, future stuff: Google plans to work on a standard for feed publishers to let Reader know about their update frequency, enable comments on shared feed items, and is working on a number of social features including a major one code-named ‘Mocha-Mocha’ (too much caffeine, Googlers?) which is set to become the standard infrastructure for social features across all Google Apps.
For the near-future, a new feature called ‘Activity Streams’ will be introduced replicating the idea of Facebook’s Minifeed, and Reader will be recommending feeds to you based on what you currently read — as well as launching in 40 other languages.
I wasn’t able to get a hold of the video, but from what’s being heard, it’s all interesting stuff. Google’s gained the reputation as an innovative little company compared to most of its competition, and I think this stuff really explains why. I admit, their innovation isn’t always consistent throughout their efforts and really varies across the number of groups they have, but the Google Reader team — as a long time user and observer — is a group of people which I have high hopes on.
