A leaked video from Google on Google Reader reveals some fascinating hints at where the reader is headed according to Blog Scoped. Some of the highlights:
- Google will work on a standard for feed publishers to tell aggegrators about changes in the feed
- The Reader team is going to integrate more social features
- Google is interested in allowing users to comment on items they share
- Very soon, Reader will recommend feeds to the user, based on previous subscriptions and other Google activity.
- Reader might be more directly monetized in the future, but Google wants to watch out showing ads next to other people’s content. This is a problem with Google News too. They might do something like they did with the non-free Opera: show the content owners’ ads in the interface when they’re AdSense publishers.
There’s heaps more – but the above interested me most. I think that the idea that they’d allow publishers who show AdSense to have their ads show in the feed is an interesting possibility that might help publishers monetize their feeds.
Also that they’ll be recommending feeds to readers is something that I think will advantage some bloggers – the question will be – how does one get on the list of recommended feeds? What sort of algorithm will determine who gets recommended? I know that some of the very biggest blogs with massive feed subscriber numbers have really benefited from being a default feed in feed readers – so this could really launch some lucky blogs!
