This years’ April Fools joke from the Google Reader team, the ReaderAdvantage™ Program, was such a huge success it prompted the team to look deeper into the usage stats the app cumulated over the years and publish some of them on the official blog. Evidently that still wasn’t enough for stats-hungry users; everyone wanted to know their own read stats for the entire time they were using Google Reader. And after today’s update, it seems the all-time read count has been added to the usual 30-day trends:
o-O.@googlereader now gives a "since" figure in trends. "Since October 7, 2005 you have read a total of 142,120 items", it says.
— Prasoon (@prsng) August 28, 2010
I also managed to read a sizeable amount of items in the 4+ years I have been using Reader: my stats show I have joined in April 2006 and since then I’ve gone through 157,734 items. That number would have easily qualified me for a Platinum badge, if I lived in the US that is. That’s an average of 98.5 items read per day for each of the 1600 (!) days since then. And I’m hovering around that average right now, as you can see from my 30-day stats. It’s also pretty close to the average Reader user with 105 items read per day as mentioned in the blog post. Considering I had much less feed subscriptions back in 2006 – on the other hand I had a lot more newsletters coming to my Gmail inbox that I have dropped in the mean time - there must have been a time when I read a lot more stories… Must try to pick up the pace again!
Completely unrelated to the stats news, it looks like Google Reader is also updating it’s favicon, like Google Calendar did a couple of days back. The roll-out is probably on the way, as I could see the old and new icons at the same time, on different browser tabs. Judging from the location of the files and the higher resolution, the new favicon is intended for the Reader web application in Chrome, both browser and OS.
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