Did Google Reader Just Turn on the Firehose?
Google's big push recently has been on enabling open, real-time technologies to publish, read, and interact with its new service Buzz. Reader, its RSS subscription and website reading service, is one of the biggest tools to integrate with the service.
Context & Ripple Effects
Reader has been drifting from plain aggregator toward social layer for a while: Google opened a public API back in December 2005, then in March 2009 reframed Reader as a social "watercooler" around shared items, and by August 2009 had shipped a flurry of reader features to keep pace. Today's news extends that arc into Google's confirmed Buzz push, where Reader is named as one of Buzz's biggest integration points.
The headline claim itself is flagged as rumored rather than confirmed: Stay N' Alive reports that Reader appears to have turned on real-time firehose streaming of updates, while what Google has actually confirmed is the Buzz launch and the Reader–Buzz integration. The story also traveled fast — TechCrunch picked it up the same day, framing it as Reader recommendations swapping popularity for personalization.
First-order effects
- If the firehose is live, every Reader subscription effectively becomes a real-time input to Buzz, making Reader's user base an instant audience and data source for Google's new social service rather than a standalone product.
- Publishers whose feeds Reader carries gain immediate distribution into Buzz streams, while Reader users' subscription and sharing activity starts feeding Buzz's personalized recommendations.
Second-order effects
- Rival feed readers face pressure to add their own real-time and social layers, since Google is repositioning the category from scheduled pull-reading to live streaming — a race that began with the August 2009 feature burst and now has a social network attached.
- Twitter-style real-time services become direct competitors for the same publisher updates, forcing publishers to think about how the same feed performs across both ecosystems.
Third-order effects
- RSS readers are structurally becoming social-graph infrastructure: whoever operates the largest subscriber base can route those subscriptions into any adjacent product, which concentrates distribution power at the platform rather than the feed owner.
- TechCrunch's same-day framing suggests feed ranking itself is shifting from raw popularity signals to personalization, a design pattern likely to spread across real-time products as Buzz matures.
The trend: Feed readers are being absorbed into real-time social platforms, with Google wiring Reader's subscription graph directly into Buzz as the latest step.