Google Reader metrics

When Google leaked a confidential introduction video on Google reader to the net, the guys over at Google Operating System were quick enough to gather some interesting material on the Reader.

As I have previously mentioned on Google's opportunity to leverage Google Reader as a part of their infrastructure, they are actually already doing it. The reader provides feed handling (the back-end of it) to not only iGoogle but also orkut, Gmail's web clips, Blogger widgets, Google Spreadsheets and Ajax API. You can read that as every service for Google that uses and will use feeds in some way. Bye bye Bloglines when Google does the integration stronger on the User interface level. As a tip, the future features are clearly pointing towards this integration, hurray!

The reader, even though in beta, also gives another glimpse of the immerse need for processing and storage when it comes to global web services. 10 TB to store data, craws 8 million feeds, stores the entire history of each feed, 200 computers doing the indexing with 650 million documents. Reader beta is no cheap investment for Google.