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Industry Trends

Sneak Peek At Google’s Plans For RSS Reader

By September 13, 2007July 30th, 2023No Comments

A blogger on GoogleBlogoscoped found a confidential video filmed during a Google employee meeting that was accidentally made available to the public, via Google Video, but has since been taken down. The video discussed the company’s plans for Google Reader and how they plan to introduce standards in RSS and integrate Social features into Reader.

The main points brought up in the video were:

  • Google intends to work with blog tools like Blogger and MovableType to establish a standard for publishers to inform feed aggregators of updates.
  • RSS feeds with more than one subscriber are prioritised for updating, and get updated hourly. Feeds with just one subscriber get updated every three hours.
  • Google Reader currently allows users to email an item to a friend. More social features will be integrated in the future, including Activity Streams, which will be similar to Facebook’s News Feeds, as well as integration in Gmail and Orkut.
  • Reader’s slow lookup times prevent it from being integrated into Universal Search.
  • Users will soon receive feed recommendations based on previous feeds they were subscribed to and Google’s own semantic grouping technology.
  • Lastly, Google intends to monetise RSS feeds on Reader in the future, but it needs to be careful about showing ads next to other publisher’s content. It might instead be limited to showing ads in the interface when the content owners are already using AdSense.

Even though the video did seem legit, the validity of the plans highlighted above are speculation at best, since the meeting could be no more than a brain storming session, rather than actual business planning.