Despite the fact that Google Reader earned praise throughout the blogosphere among geeks and normal people (note: I’m a geek so no hating here) its Achilles heel was the fact that Google Reader was unable to count above the number “one” when reporting subscribers (something FeedBurner fans would lamented often.
Now it appears that the search engine king has remedied that previous error and uses a cat herding parable to describe why this took so long.
Publishers have been asking us to report the number of users that are subscribed to their feeds in Google Reader. This is something we’ve been wanting to do for a while, but with all the products that use feeds at Google, corralling the data in one place was like herding cats. So herd we did, and as of today, our crawler reports the number of Google users subscribed to the feed. The count includes subscribers from Google Reader and the Google Personalized Homepage, and in the future may include other Google products that support feeds.
The FeedBurner crew is celebrating this move, although they are reporting that users will be unable to view their stats until tomorrow morning, central time.
IMHO Google Reader is one of the few successful “in house googlie products,” with the others being Gmail, Google News, Google Video (before it got spanked by YouTube) and of course the ever vigilant Google Search.
With Google Reader finally reporting our true subscriber numbers, I wonder whether or not this will reveal if Google Reader is even more popular than Bloglines?
