Google Reader now talks back

Posted on | February 17, 2007 | No Comments

as of yesterday, Google finally reports back RSS subscription-numbers to content-publishers, which basically means that feed-statistics like FeedBurner can now include the number of readers subscribed to a feed through Google Reader or the personalized Google homepage (this wasn’t possible before, meaning that probably thousands of readers wouldn’t show up in your feed-stats). in case you – like me – wonder how this works, Google simply embeds the number of current subscribers into the http-request fetching the feed:

User-Agent: Feedfetcher-Google;
(+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 3980 subscribers;
feed-id=1794595805790851116)

as a bonus they’ve also added an FAQ aimed at publishers.

btw, according to my own FeedBurner-stats, Google Reader’s marketshare among RSS-readers seems to rise:

 

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