Google posted a couple of graphs today showing how use continues to grow from year to year. 

"Since Reader’s fifth anniversary is also approaching (though it feels like yesterday, Reader was launched on October 7, 2005), we thought it might be a good time to reflect on how Reader has grown over the past few years. While we were busy redesigning (twice!), making friends with Buzz and iGoogle, translating, breaking up, gossiping and playing, more and more people picked up the Reader habit," writes Google’s Mihai Parparita. 

Unfortunately, Google doesn’t let it be known just how many people are using Google, but there is clearly an upward trend. They do say that users are counted as someone who uses Reader once a week. That is depicted in this graph:

 This graph shows number of items read per day:

 It would appear that as more people use Reader, they are also reading more within Reader. 

Regardless of the numbers, Google is aiming to pick up Bloglines’ leftovers. The company is encouraging users to import their Bloglines feeds into Google Reader.

While this is certainly good news for Facebook, it doesn’t necessarily mean bad things for Google. These two are increasingly becoming bigger competitors, but Google, at least the search engine part, doesn’t always aim to keep users on its site. Sure, it does to some extent with things like Google Places and hosted AP articles, but the release of Google Instant this week clearly shows that Google wants to get users what they’re searching for faster. 

That’s not to say that Google doesn’t want users sticking around. I think we’ll see more direct answers coming from Google itself in its search results. Google Squared is a big part of this. 

Speaking of Google Instant, Danny Sullivan has an interesting article about the company disguising relevancy issues with the feature. Also, I have another article up about Google Instant’s effect on web history, and how it might work from the browser search box and Chrome address bar. 

Janko Roettgers at NewTeeVee points out that early demos of Google TV appear to display a Google Instant-like functionality. We should see it soon enough, as Google TV devices should be shipping this month. 

USA Today has an interesting interview with a Bing exec who talks about how a feature similar to Google Instant was built for Bing last year. 

ProgammableWeb reports that USA Today is opening up its data to developers via an API. According to Romin Irani, the newspaper hopes to raise internal awareness about its databases first, with public access and a developer contest to follow. 

Ask announced that Bloglines will be shut down October 1. " Not an easy decision, especially considering our loyal and supportive (not to mention patient) user base, but, ultimately, the right one given business reasons simply too hard to ignore," the company says.

Caitlin Fitzsimmons reports that Facebook has filed for a patent on social CAPTCHAs. The title is "USING SOCIAL INFORMATION FOR AUTHENTICATING A USER SESSION". The abstact says, "A social CAPTCHA is presented to authenticate a member of the social network. The social CAPTCHA includes one or more challenge questions based on information available in the social network, such as the user’s activities and/or connections in the social network. The social information selected for the social CAPTCHA may be determined based on affinity scores associated with the member’s connections, so that the challenge question relates to information that the user is more likely to be familiar with. A degree of difficulty of challenge questions may be determined and used for selecting the CAPTCHA based on a degree of suspicion."

We knew Windows Phone 7 would be here this year, but there is now a launch date, according to Pocket-lint, citing multiple sources familiar with the matter. That date would be October 11. 

Reuters is reporting that a judge has reinstated eBay’s 28.4% stake in Craigslist, but Craigslist still gets to keep eBay off its board. 

An interesting piece from Jonny Evans at ComputerWorld discusses how big Apple’s AirPlay is going to be for the company. This is one of Apple’s recent announcements that may have been overshadowed by some of the others, but has pretty big implications. 

Jenna Wortham at the New York Times’ Bits blog talks about a new social news service from Betaworks and the NYT. It will be called News.me and will be personalized. 

TechRadar reports that Google says Android isn’t optimized for tablets, but the Gingerbread and Honeycomb versions (the next two) likely will be. 

Michael Arrington says some ex-MySpace execs are working on a new startup called Namesake, which is in private beta. The exact nature of it is still unknown.

 Hitwise’s Stats On Google Reader, Bloglines
(Photo Credit: Hitwise)

Heather Hopkins piles on the statistics, writing, "A year ago, Bloglines attracted twice the share of US Internet visits compared with Google Reader.  The gap has closed to 40% in the week to 17th May 2008.  Last week, Bloglines ranked 21st among Blogs and Personal Websites and Google Reader ranked 32nd.  A year ago, those sites ranked 45th and 118th.  Share of US Internet visits to Bloglines have increased 158% in the past year and visits to Google Reader are up 267%."

This information has to be a little disappointing to Ask, which owns Bloglines.  While Google Reader has received relatively little attention from its corporate owner, Bloglines benefited from a major update just two months ago.  Also, even if the Bloglines Team was a bit sluggish in responding to an outage, Google Reader’s crew seems more likely to ignore criticism.

In any event, Hopkins found that the two sites seem to be serving different audiences.  "Google Reader sent 61% more visits to News and Media websites than Bloglines," she reports.  Bloglines instead sent more visits to the "Photography" and "Shopping and Classifieds" categories.

It should be interesting to see how this slow-motion race continues.

The starting point of the outage is difficult to pinpoint; some users appear to have been receiving perfect service all along.  Complaints on a Bloglines support forum began snowballing on February 12th or so, though, and only this morning did signs of progress appear.

    Blogline’s Feeds Not
    Updating

"[A] couple of my feeds have been updated," writes "Krunk4Ever."  "[L]ooks like they’re working on the issue right now."  A commenter on a TechCrunch article makes a similar statement.

But it’s a bit too late for Bloglines, and its owner Ask, to retain some customers.  "Mithras" recently wrote, "I used bloglines as my feed reader for the past couple of years, but I have noticed in the past that it takes a while to update feeds.  And today it’s not updating at all.  And so I also discovered how easy it is to export your subscriptions to google reader.  Which is not down, and which seems to update very quickly.  So, just like that, I think I’ve abandoned one web app for another."

Bloglines should consider explaining its outage before even more users bail.  Also, people who are waffling between services might want to know that the last post on the Official Google Reader Blog was made 18 days ago.

Bloglines has rolled out a slew of new features today, including:

1. Save: Allows you to save posts including text and graphics (if made available by the publisher) to the Saved folder, so you have quick access for reference later.
2. Photo Widget: Provides large thumbnails of images from your Flickr feeds. Previously, only the text description was available, so viewing Flickr feeds is better and faster.
3. Blog View: A new option with the 3-Pane View that lets you see the full blog site versus just the feed article. You’ll see not only the article, but also other site features like Comments and left and right rail page elements, including ads.

Another nice option is ability to either “Save” or “Pin” an item in Bloglines.

What’s the difference?

Sometimes you want article “Pinned” in your reading flow so you’re forced to look at it again to really absorb the complexity of the post. Other times, you want to file away those posts that stand the test of time. That might sound very nuanced, but remember if you’re reading 1,000 articles a day, like Blogliners, you develop several different reading modes.

That could come in very hand–especially if you’re a procrastinating blogger.

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Sometimes as a reader you want to do more with an article that really catches your eye. Pinning it in place works well, but there are other feeds to read.

Eric Engleman at Bloglines wrote about the subtle difference between Pin and the new Save function in the Bloglines Beta:

You might ask, “Why have “Pin” and “Save”?” Sometimes you want article “Pinned” in your reading flow so you’re forced to look at it again to really absorb the complexity of the post. Other times, you want to file away those posts that stand the test of time. That might sound very nuanced, but remember if you’re reading 1,000 articles a day, like Blogliners, you develop several different reading modes.

Two other new features have been slated for debut this week on Bloglines Beta. One will be the Photo Widget brings in large thumbnails of images on one’s subscribed Flickr feeds.

The second: a Blog View that allows the viewer to see the full blog rather than just the feed article. This gives people the opportunity to see comments as well as content in the sidebars (like ads!)

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You can also go to the preview page for any feed and see its ranking, even if it isn’t in the top 1000, if you know its siteid. For example, this blog, with 54 subscribers, is ranked 22,975.

InsideGoogle is thankfully in 843 place. If you don’t like your ranking, you can claim multiple feeds your site has and consolidate them, so total subscriber count is given credit, rather than seperate Atom, RSS 2.0, RSS 0.91 feeds and so on.

In the first ranking, Slashdot’s 103,771 subscribers makes it #1. Dilbert is 10,000 behind, followed by Engadget. The official Google blog is eighth. Gizmodo is #17 and #74, and adding the two subscriber counts together could make it number 7. There are a good number of site’s that would rank much better if they consolidated feeds.

Check out the full list at beta.bloglines.com/b/topfeeds.

A post should be about this on Bloglines’ news page tonight.

Also, Bloglines shipped some minor improvements, continuing to improve beta Bloglines. I only spotted them because I live my life in Bloglines, but one of them made my life a hell of a lot better.

They changed the behavior of the “f” hotkey, which loads up the next folder of feeds. Instead of opening the folder, it keeps the folder closed and selects it, loading all feed items from that folder, exactly like I normally do with the mouse. Using the “f” key and “j” key, you can go down through items (”j,j,j,j”), then when you reach the end, load the next folder (”j,j,j,f,j,j,f,j”).

I’m breezing through my feeds now faster than ever before. They seem to have improved the performance as well, though that could just be my imagination.

Another improvement: The title bar now shows the number of unread feed items, as well as the number of items you’ve pinned. Whether you keep Bloglines open in a seperate browser window or in a tab, you will always have a cound of the number of unread items to rely on while you’re doing something else.

Finally, they made the address bar update with a unique URL based on what you are viewing. This way, if you hit refresh or restore a browser session, everything will be right back where you were, still reading the same feed as before.

So, another month, another update for Bloglines. What a great pace for them to be keeping up. Sure, its little things, but if Bloglines gets a little bit better every month, just imagine how amazing it can be in the long run. They really are listening to the users and giving people what they want. Gotta love it.

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Here’s an update:

“echo help” now reveals new commands:

• cat
• cd
• changelog
• clear (previously available but undocumented)
• ls

Echo, set and show are still available.

Cat has two uses:

• cat folder_name
• cat feed_name

No idea what they do, though entering cat and the name of a folder (case-sensitive) is not rejected by the system.

cd is Change Directory, a standard DOS command. It has three uses:

• cd folder_name
• cd ..
• cd /

I was able to navigate into folders by entering “cd” and the name of the folder, case sensitive.

I cannot find the proper usage for changelog. It would not display the changelog no matter what I used.

Clear clears the screen.

ls is a list command. In any directory, it will give you the contents of the directory, along with some letters. It’s somewhat like this:

drwxr–r– Google
drwxr–r– Microsoft

Non public folders do not have the r– designation. The “d” means it is a folder, feeds do not have a d in the beginning.

Set has four usages:

• set hotkey action
• set theme theme_name
• set text text_color
• set background background_color

I cannot find the names of the hotkeys, but the themes can be changed simply by using the theme name, and the text and background can be changed to any color name or hex code.

Show has three usages:

• show hotkeys
• show themes
• show profile

Show hotkeys doesn’t work now. Show themes shows you the four themes, white, black, old and burnt_umber. Old is green text on black, while burnt_umber is white text on brown. Show profile launches the User Settings page.

Ben Lowery and Bjorn Tipling explain at TechOpus that it’s a javascript Read-eval-print loop running inside the browser’s Javascript VM, and you can call into the Dojo or Bloglines APIs. Examples:

bl.feeds.refreshCounts() will update your unread counts

bl.feeds.load() will reload the feed tree

dojo.require(”bl.login”);
bl.login(”userName”,”password”) to login to an account

If you find anything else, let me know. I’m enjoying using this, though I’ve yet to figure out the cool things I can accomplish with it.

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The other new thing is a new mobile Bloglines, this one in beta. Available at m.beta.bloglines.com, it features some good stuff, like splitting up feed reading into seperate pages, so only a few posts load at a time, and a mobile version of your Bloglines Beta start page, showing you the five most recent posts from your favorite feeds on a single page.

Finally, they’ve added a number of settings you can mess with to improve and tweak your experience. Hitting Settings now lets you choose whether whole feeds get marked as read or just what you’ve scrolled past, which of the three views you want to be server all the time (trust me, its better to let this develop naturally as you use Bloglines) and whether you want feed CSS to be used by Bloglines.

All in all, the third update in less than forty days, I’m pretty impressed. Even at a much slower pace than this, they’re setting the tone that Bloglines is alive and well, and getting the attention it deserves.

Now, if only they could get rid of that pesky auto-drop down on the left side that contains “Mark All Feeds Read”. I’ve had two disasters already with that damn thing.

More by Gary and Brad Linder.

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Some other cool features? Resize your text areas (great for blogging!) and a nice clean look for buttons:

Oh yeah, and its FAST. Faster in HTML performance, Javascript Performance, and Application Launch compared to IE, FireFox, and Opera. Check it out for yourself. Here’s a screenshot, and the blurb from Apple’s site:

From Apple’s site:

Built-in RSS.
Scan all the latest news, information, and articles from thousands of websites in one simple-to-read, searchable article list delivered right to you. The built-in RSS (Really Simple Syndication) reader in Safari tells you when new articles or blog posts have been added to your favorite sites, so you never have to guess.

Whenever you land on a page that offers an RSS feed, Safari displays an RSS icon in the address field. Click it and you view the simple RSS feed. Bookmark it and Safari tells you how many updates have been added since your last visit. The RSS view in Safari is customizable, so you can adjust article length or sort and filter articles by date, title, and source. You can also use the built-in search field to find articles relating to topics of interest. All from one place: Safari.

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