Guest: Nick Baum - Google
Host: Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
Hello, this is Robert Scoble and this is The Scoble Show and tonight it is October 31st; Halloween night. Before the kids get here, I'm recording a little bit of video and we have Google's Reader Team coming up for you, but firstly, I just want to say thank you very much to Seagate for sponsoring my show and providing these beautiful hard drives for me to encode my show on. Without them, I couldn't bring you what I'm doing here tonight. Anyways hope you had a great Halloween, you'll all get to see this show tomorrow on Wednesday, so hope you like it, thanks. Who are you and where the hell am I?

Nick Baum - Google
So, you are at Google and I'm Nick Baum, the product manager for Google Reader.

Jason Shellen - Google
And I'm Jason Shellen.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
I know who you are.

Jason Shellen - Google
Yeah.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
You are Jason?

Jason Shellen - Google
That's true. I was Scobleized before, yes.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
You were on Pyra.

Jason Shellen - Google
I was at Pyra Labs before we came to Google and I've been here since 2003 and...

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
You are old school brother.

Jason Shellen - Google
I'm old school.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
But three 9/11 blogging kind of...

Jason Shellen - Google
Yes.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
I thought you're out of old school -- you were blogging before...

Jason Shellen - Google
I spent a lot of time telling people what a blog was and then explaining what a blog was and then describing why you might want to blog, so that old school.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
Explain what's behind your (Inaudible).

Jason Shellen - Google
We've got a YPod, it's the Google master plan, and it's sort of a joke. Some of the stuff on there might get done one day but don't know about the ponies. Don't know about the ponies but are you zooming in because there're some good things on there? We actually have this port all the way filled up and any time the visitor would come by, they would take a photo or add something themselves to the master plan, but about a week or two ago they actually wiped it all clean; decided to start with a new master plan and you see there's a big box here it says 'Fun'. So, they are calling it a new strategy.

Speaker
New strategy.

Jason Shellen - Google
New strategy, yeah.

Speaker
Exclusively here.

Speaker
Exactly.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
And then what's that thing over there.

Jason Shellen - Google
That is live search queries as they're appearing around the world, so anytime you see lights coming from an area out into space there, that's essentially search query volume. So, right now we're seeing it cross over the dark continent of Africa and now its crossing the Atlantic and you can see the Eastern seaport has a few search queries going on right now. You can see the colors of languages.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
I wrote Bill Gates -- I had a true story, I wrote to Bill Gates after I saw this on a previous trip and I said, there's more light coming off of Redmond than entire continent of Africa. They said, you guys have a problem with your search because your own employees are using Google instead of Microsoft search.

Jason Shellen - Google
It's good, it keeps us thinking about the fact that there are very many search queries coming from the dark areas of the world which probably means more than just the fact that they are not using Google.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
Yeah, so I will come over here and have a chat with you guys.

Speaker
All right.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
So, Google Reader, hey what's up? So, you want bloggers talk to you or (Inaudible) reader to you?

Jason Shellen - Google
So, I started the Google Reader project a while ago with a blogger engineer, he and I had an idea for a way to do some interesting JavaScript stuff. Do you need to get that?

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
No.

Jason Shellen - Google
Okay.

Speaker
I put my phone on silent, remember this.

Jason Shellen - Google
That's good, that's good.

Speaker
I'm totally unreachable.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
Evil machines.

Jason Shellen - Google
So, we started the project a while ago just as a 20% time project and I served as a...

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
Explain what that means.

Jason Shellen - Google
Sure, 20% project. Any -- actually all engineers at Google are encouraged to spend at least twenty percent of their time on some project that is not a full time focus that they are spending time on. So, in other words if you are a search quality engineer, the other twenty percent of your time you should be doing something other than maybe search quality. So, in this case, it meant that -- for that blogger engineer that he spent twenty percent of his time doing something else. Sometimes it can be an enhancement to the core product that you are working on but more often than not it's something that is really...

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
Now, I've heard you guys had to work 70 hour-weeks here and so is that twenty percent of your 70 hour and like you get (Inaudible) weekends to your (Inaudible)?

Jason Shellen - Google
There're jokes about having multiple 20% projects or 20% plus projects and things like that but really it has to be with the passion of the engineer and I think there are a lot of popular misconceptions about how the time is put up as well. So it's not one day a week, it could be twenty percent of your time for three months, that means you are spending some dedicated time on that. Really it's just a way to foster and encourage innovation and we've actually seen a lot of success out of that program and what happens usually is if its successful, its doing really well, then an engineer will go to their manager and present it, or to other Googlers and get them interested.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
We should explain the voice that you are hearing.

Jason Shellen - Google
Right.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
We are in the middle of a main entry way to one of the main Google buildings here (Inaudible).

Jason Shellen - Google
We're right in the lobby. Just wait till lunch starts, then the voice might get louder. We'll be shouting about Google Reader. So, in this case the 20% project was -- it was interesting enough that it got the interest of other people who thought, oh, maybe we'll add that as our 20% project that's actually how we first got our Google co-engineers I went out and lobbied for other people to spend just twenty percent of their time and ensnared them in the project and they started spending more and more time. So, actually I served as the product manager for Google Reader for good long time and we've launched Web 2.0 last year and I spent up until May of this year as the project manager and so I like to be spending my time on telling more people about Reader and Blogger and Picasso and things like that so actually I'm on the (Inaudible) team but I'm still actively working with the Reader team in terms of helping to shape the direction and strategy and things like that and talking to partners about Reader. I do a lot of demos still on Reader but anyway it's done really well under Nick this summer as you can see.

Nick Baum - Google
I was an engineer actually.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
You were like the slaves for the project?

Nick Baum - Google
Not on the project, not on the reader project but no, I just thought it would be interesting to move to product management and write about the bad time Jason was moving over and so it was a perfect 06:34 that I've always been interested in RSS and Feed Readers and stuff like that so it's been a lot of fun.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
But it's interesting because RSS is just keeps getting more and more important. I speak to lot of audiences too and used to be only the geekiest audiences who'd even have a hand (Inaudible) even the ungeekiest audiences have hands going up and saying I use RSS.

Nick Baum - Google
Although the term RSS I think, we are trying to give that less importance because it shouldn't really matter what it is right?

Jason Shellen - Google
In fact there's a feature of the new Google Reader where you can cruise through and you can Star items or share items or things like that and they can show up as a shared page. It's like about the lightest way kind of blogging that you can do. It still has other ways to go in my opinion but that's actually how this project started was a way to kind of re-blog things and we started with that and then went, okay we'll wait, maybe we can use this technology as a Feed Reader, kind of approve the model and then get back into that area. So, I think it's an important shift that we have that as a piece of the product now and it shows maybe a sort of -- maybe some future direction, maybe some interesting collaborations in the future. I think the important thing there is that for someone to go visit your shared page or a blog, that's different than saying, hey will you read all of the things that I applied to my RSS Reader; I go who, what are you talking, I don't know RSS reader but I do know a web page; I can visit a web page I can do that and if I'm interested, then maybe I start using Google Reader to manage all of those different pages that I...

Nick Baum - Google
I mean it's also different from setting up a blog and going and getting an account somewhere and having to customize your template or anything like that. I know a lot of people who would like to share stuff, who would like to have a web page but they don't want to go though all that work and now we make it as simple as a click.

Jason Shellen - Google
Not that it's hard to set up a blog on blogger.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
It's actually -- it's interesting because that taught so many people to blog and it's interesting that people have trouble linking to things. Do you know they don't know how to blow away and its like, well you have to highlight what you want and you have to go to the link but even that act is a tough thing for a lot of people who aren't in the tech world and aren't used to looking for a link...

Nick Baum - Google
Right, you remember early on in blogging where people cared deeply about the way you blog and you know the form and I think that kind of has been blown, a part of it has, two or three years as its rise to popularity. So, its funny you still look back and go oh yeah you know people who have like a very particular way they wanted links to be done and it's interesting all the link blogging that has gone on has sort of change that. So you know what, a post can stand on its own and just be a link, it doesn't need to be a full post or commentary things like that. So, I think I don't know if things are falling apart and unlike kind of going back together; feels like that way with Google Reader where the ability to kind of add your own voice, is coming into the product with that sharing or starring.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
Yeah I really like it. Tell me a little bit about Google Reader? It's a web based reader right, so there's many different kinds of readers out there and some go into news, with some go into email clients like the one I usually use, some go on to the desktop or -- but you guys use a web based approach so you use a web browser to go to Google Reader and tell me why you picked that approach versus one of the offline approaches?

Nick Baum - Google
So, I think that Google usually has made very nice web applications and believes that they can be just as fast and as usable as an offline application and that they have a number of other advantages, mainly that you can access them on any computer, if something crashes or dies on you, all your data's saved at Google and also that you can access it from different...

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
Does Google ever crash? I haven't seen it, you know.

Nick Baum - Google
I haven't seen it yet.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
It will be like a dark day.

Nick Baum - Google
Not unlike it, exactly. No and then the last big thing I think is that you can access it in lots of different ways because the data is in one place and so you can access it on your cell phone, you can put it on your personalized home page, you can have different views of it within Reader and those things I think are harder to do in an offline reader.

Jason Shellen - Google
I think there's an evolution to that, the reason that the project was even able to be done was that we have this conversion so the Ajax stuff that was going on. We had Gmail coming out, we had -- I think the Atom feed format was actually -- one of the ways that it started was, Chris was on our team said, you know I bet I can write some JavaScript that would take an Atom feed and because it's well formed and make that show upon a web page, and then from then we've got like all of these like really interesting ways, like let's parse XML in the page itself?

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
You guys are actually using Atom in a pretty unique way, you have a river of views kind of format where all my feeds get up onto one page and so I can just keep scrolling down and it says like 20 items viewed or are available to view and then as you scroll down, as you get close to the bottom of the page it reloads more without you even really seeing that reloading going on and that's pretty nice and I like that a lot.

Jason Shellen - Google
Yeah, so we came up with that through the design process we realized that if you loaded everything in one go; it made the page very heavy, it took your time load (ph) and so by loading it a little bit at a time but doing in a clever way so that it shows up before the user gets to the bottom of the page -- you know it's much smoother.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
Like an infinite scroll you can just scroll forever.

Jason Shellen - Google
Oh, I love it yeah.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
Particularly if you have enough feeds. Now, do you guys track how many feeds people subscribe to you or?

Jason Shellen - Google
We have numbers on that, we see -- I mean its not tracking individual users but its more like, hey look a certain percentage of our users have over hundred feeds or most people have x amount of feeds, obviously we can't share those numbers Robert, but...

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
Oh come on.

Jason Shellen - Google
But, we know your user ID and Fifty thousand feeds, what are you doing man?

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
They're telling me about the foreign feeds that this guy did.

Jason Shellen - Google
Everything has a layer of abstraction obviously but I don't know how many feeds are you tracking these days?

Nick Baum - Google
How many feeds am I reading personally? Oh, I am about 70 feeds.

Jason Shellen - Google
Seventy, only seventy?

Nick Baum - Google
Well, yeah I know I'm lightweight. I was reading a blogger this morning who said he had 2000 feeds.

Jason Shellen - Google
I know I saw that, I think it was a...

Nick Baum - Google
I don't understand how...

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
(Inaudible).

Jason Shellen - Google
No, we were the one though up here a few years ago. We actually we used your OPML file to test the first version of Reader when you consider it I only got 1600 or something around there. I only have 280 and I...

Nick Baum - Google
That's pretty good.

Jason Shellen - Google
I think it's too much.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
I'm at less than 200 now I just didn't overlook actually that's one of the issue we're getting to now. When I started using RSS I think there were only 100 blogs I really cared about yours was one and Allen's was one, (Inaudible) was one and it was easy to keep track of the world that day. It was a pretty finite world; you could see the edges of the world. Now you can't see the edges of the world (Inaudible), its doubled in size so many times that there's no way I could read maturity in the feeds out there. And even the ones that I'm reading, I'm reading like 180, are just -- I get too much stuff. So, I sort of like the river approach because I can just surf through that really fast and sort of scan and pull things out that are interesting but are you guys looking at other approaches. Digg, for instance and Tech Meal and Tail Ranker (ph) approaches to try to deal with overload and try to bring the more important stuff into your base, are you guys working on stuff like that?

Jason Shellen - Google
Well, I think you've seen a fundamental shift, I mean the original vision was not encapsulated by that, first product that you saw. You saw one view, we had a lens view, we get one item at the time and you can scroll though it quickly if you want to but the intention was always to have these like expanded views, list views. So, I think you'll see the idea is that we have that infrastructure in place so that we can put different views and visions on top of that and you've seen the manifestation of that now and that was -- I mean that was the feature I was trying for was to set an ability to treat it like my inbox and cruise through and open things that I really care about. Then I think other media types changed things too, right, so what if it's just audio, what if it's just video, what if it's image data? How do we treat those things in the future? So last December we were aware that we treated photos, that we have like sort of like a thumb nail gallery in the lens view; I imagine that Nick's probably thinking about all sorts of fun ways to treat media in the future.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
Can you grip one way that deal with overload is take a thousand feeds and break them up into like (Inaudible) blogs, my used blogs, my cool friends blogs, and stuff like that is there a way to look at just blogs in a subset of your feeds?

Nick Baum - Google
So, right now we have a folding (ph) mechanism where you can group your different sites in folders and then you can view one -- have a view where you see all items from one folder. So, that is a pretty easy way to organize it yourself. Of course I think it would be really interesting to do this in an automatic way, to say for example, all these blogs seem to be dealing with photography, let's put them all together.

Jason Shellen - Google
The one I really like in the new version is that, that top level page and I guess some people just want to dive right in but that top level page in Reader, when you are at home, it gives like a bit of a clustering, like saying here is some recent interesting stuff and I think absolutely like the clustering of similar items and things like that, that could be really interesting in the future as well.

Nick Baum - Google
Just also to this idea of the information overload, I think that's also where the sharing features come in because I'm a big believer in the local information - that if I'm friends with you, I know that you are really into tech and that you'll find the articles and you'll keep track of which are the most influential tech bloggers. So, if you start sharing items, I don't have to subscribe to 200 tech bloggers, I just subscribe to your shared items and same thing I'm into photography and so if my friends want to learn about photography, they don't need to go hunt for the best photo blog out there. They can just subscribe to my shared feed and it has lots of (Inaudible). So, it's about trust right, if you know someone who is very invested in a field then you can just outsource the work of finding the sources...

Jason Shellen - Google
We've already seen people that are -- they are sharing that clip of the things that they will start on their site and now extends to all tags. People can actually share it from the tags. The other thing that's interesting is, people are starting to say, like here is my share of the public page, go visit it and now looking at it putting right on their blogs or on some other page. So, we're starting to see like that sort of economy developers well okay trust me here's what I think of the most important things. So, that's a really important part of this re-blogging or having...

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
Can you do that to mobile phones too, the mobile phone reader can I start things from there?

Jason Shellen - Google
You can.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
So, if I'm on beach with my mobile phone I can start things...

Jason Shellen - Google
Yeah, absolutely.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
That's really nice.

Jason Shellen - Google
That's a recent feature I don't want to say within the past few weeks since we're working on...

Nick Baum - Google
And the Mobile UI is pretty convenient when you are sitting on a shuttle commune or something.

Jason Shellen - Google
Exactly.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
How are you guys going make money out of this?

Jason Shellen - Google
How are we going to make money of this?

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
Yeah. And you didn't care -- one thing I like about Google is it doesn't -- same age group, doesn't seem to have a directive to make money for the company You know, there's one another group called AdSense or AdWords is rather directive for you all but you guys are going to do weird things like put ads and feeds or anything like that or do you have a commitment on kind of advertising that you are going to do on Reader?

Jason Shellen - Google
I mean all options remain open at this time so I won't commit saying that we won't do something like that but I think the likelihood is that whatever we do would be in step with our publishers. So, if you are a publisher and you want to use Google somehow to monetize your feeder content, it will work with you, whatever that means for Reader in the future if that means there will be a way doing that. I think a great example is blogger, rather than adding AdSense to all blogs, they say, hey would you like to add AdSense to your blog and here paste your code in here, we will figure it out and put it in your blog and put it in your feed if you want to do that. That's probably...

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
And if you get popular you can make some money that way.

Jason Shellen - Google
Exactly.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
So, you guys actually share revenue with your users where other systems don't share revenue at all?

Jason Shellen - Google
Right, we're making money on it.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
Quite nice of you guys!

Jason Shellen - Google
Sure, but as I say it right now for Google Reader there are no immediate plans for doing anything like that.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
Are we -- this is an interesting point for the publishing industry because I see a lot of old school webpages that don't treat RSS very well, they use partial feeds because they're hoping that you click on that link and go to the cool webpage where they're going to see all your advertising because they only get paid if that page gets loaded and they don't really care whether you look at it, although advertisers do, but they care that the web browser pulls down all the ads and loads it because that's how they get paid if you come on an CPM basis. Are you guys ever going to put ads or let people build -- Google advertising into the feed itself, because then I can move away from that page view model and into a feed model where...

Jason Shellen - Google
Oh we actually -- we do have our product AdSense for feeds right now. We launched that in May 2005 or let's say. There you go.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
I don't run ads on my blogs, so I'm not up on the latest stuff.

Jason Shellen - Google
It's already in there and we felt like it was important to get into that model of advertising. Obviously, Google is a search company and an advertising company, we have a lot of exploratory...

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
And now a video company too.

Jason Shellen - Google
Fairly a video company (Inaudible).

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
(Inaudible) not you personally. really wish you could be on those discussions. Congrats on getting YouTube, by the way.

Jason Shellen - Google
Thank you, I think...

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
I think I want to see how you guys put YouTube into the new versions of Reader...

Nick Baum - Google
Yeah, and that well...

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
I got lot of video feeds; I want to subscribe to...

Nick Baum - Google
So, actually this was a feature that we launched earlier in the spring as Google Reader is actually compatible with YouTube and Google review feeds. So that, if you subscribe to a feed of the top YouTube videos or the top Google Reader's...

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
You just guaranteed every (Inaudible) in the world is going to look at what feeds you accept or not because that's our prediction, right. Well Google Reader can read it or maybe a little buyer in that the feature...

Nick Baum - Google
Okay, I mean there it was mainly a choice of like who are the big players in the market and that's actually really fun because you can just scroll through, find a ton of content, and it's basically like having your own TV channel, right.

Jason Shellen - Google
Although that brings up a tough point which is that, rather than just supporting the top content producers, I mean YouTube and Google Video work like a funnel like for publishers and independent publishers as well. So, I think it was in some respects a security question like, what embedded content can we accept that isn't going to malicious and YouTube and Google Video happen to come up with a monolith that seems to work. Supporting open standards is very important, obviously there is always a security concern coupled with that, so I think moving forward it sounds like Yahoo and Apple and stuff like that.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
Do you get extra feeds with the enclosure like it's got a time, like Don Andrew or Podcast kind of or a Netcast feed...

Jason Shellen - Google
We do, right now it works better for audio feeds and it has video depending on the type of video because it depends on the enclosure type.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
So, Rocket Film (ph) it would be hard to subscribe to that or...

Jason Shellen - Google
You can, you can subscribe to Rocket Film right now but I'm not sure, they have a few feeds although they are Rocket Films. They've like a 2.0 with enclosures and Atom and all the different ones. I'm not sure if any of them play directly and, Reader, have you tested that?

Nick Baum - Google
No, I should check that out. (Inaudible).

Jason Shellen - Google
Exactly. But again back to our point about having (Inaudible), needing to get to a point where, Media RSS or from what I understand of the Media RSS effect, it turns out that you can put enclosures and fairly easily in Atom. So, that stuff needs to settle out maybe in the standards world before things come through -- come to Reader. But we kind of want to give a flavor like what's up and coming within Reader which is why we'll do things like some specific media host and providers in a security safe way.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
Because you don't want to have somebody accidentally subscribed to feed, that's probably pushing down executables regarding what type of machine or something like that. What's your developer story, do you have any API that developers can build stuff on top of or anything like that?

Jason Shellen - Google
It's un-official, at this point of time...

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
If they find the APIs, they can use it.

Jason Shellen - Google
It was very widely promulgating the (Inaudible) published the unpublished API for us and I think that the fault is -- like most other Google products is that there needs to be an API story and we felt strongly about that and we love to open that up in the future but it's still a latest product, we're still sorting out, like what the UI is going to like.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
There are some of the stuff I saw really were some bookmark tools so that as I surf around web pages, blogs or pages like BBC and it finds an RSS feed, I can subscribe right from that. Is that sort of way you are letting developers do that kind of build extensible stuff on top of it, like in Windows Vista, there is going to be a side bar, put a little button on the side bar and it automatically subscribes to Star.

Nick Baum - Google
So, basically Google Reader that the current interface you see is built on top of the basic API and all the different views, whether it's the mobile view or the precise homepage module, are all just running up of that same API. So, eventually, the hope is that an external developer could do anything we do by using the API.

Jason Shellen - Google
So, I think we have got (Inaudible).

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
(Inaudible) could I build my own reader using the Google's data store?

Jason Shellen - Google
Sure, and I know you had some questions about, I'll bring it up, the intention stuff. I think our intention there is that if...

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
You explained, what I meant by that.

Jason Shellen - Google
Exactly (Inaudible).

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
Oh a lot of people don't know what -- at least as I define intention, its like every time I click on something to read something, Google knows that because its marked it as red on the store and if I go back to that feed, its marked as red and it doesn't show up anymore.

Jason Shellen - Google
So, again those are all things that we have a feed of your red items and do we have a feed of your unread items as well?

Speaker
In a way, it's marked in the application, when you view; I mean right now its doing -- it almost looks like its eye-tracking but it's scrolling down each post and marking as red. Well that's attention data and in our minds that means that in the future that people will absolutely be able to build an application based on some sort of feed from a reader. Now, authentication is she just thinks that guy a little tricky, right now that's why its still un-official; we haven't talked in an official way to authenticate (Inaudible).

Jason Shellen - Google
Well no, but there's also a later obstruction there as well, so I can't look up that data.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
I want to see what Cory Doctorow was reading.

Jason Shellen - Google
We should ask him to star things and add that to his shared page. Ask him to start keeping a blog maybe. I think, so that's very important to us that people have a lot of interesting ideas outside of these blogs (ph) obviously and we would like to see some of those put to use. I know there has been a lot of question between a web-based reader and a desktop reader. I think that in the future it'll be great if like Net News Wires or something that -- somebody prefers to use that sort of desktop plan and wants to reader API, when it's out. Today lets do that and they get the best of (Inaudible)...

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
Will there be a licensing fee, if that was the case?

Jason Shellen - Google
I don't-- that's one of the reasons that it's not out yet I simply don't have...

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
The world haven't approved yet.

Speaker
And that's an unofficial API, right?

Nick Baum - Google
I think another big reason for that is that, its labs were still developing it and once you have an API out there, developers start relying on it and you don't want to change it on themselves.

Jason Shellen - Google
Right.

Nick Baum - Google
We want to make sure we have everything, all the features we want to put in there before we release it.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
And his name on the variable names that I think...

Jason Shellen - Google
Exactly, so I think that's definitely one of the concerns is having dependencies. But I don't know it seems like people really like Google Reader right now and there has been such positive response over the past few weeks, so it could be interesting.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
That API and attention data match that up as a developer on my own machine could I intercept that attention data, the items that I'm reading and do something with them, like put on -- the most red things in my own feeds are, could I build an App that keeps track of the feeds that I'm reading and I don't know I'm rapping here because I'm trying to think of the information overload problem and if I have a thousand feeds and I only actually read 20 of them.

Nick Baum - Google
So, right now yeah, you could -- if you figure out how that API works, you could get to your personal leading data. So, you can know how many items you read from any given feed users right, so we don't offer any aggregated data. So you can't find out how many people have read a given post that you have read in or something like that. But, if you want...

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
I can't see other people's data but I can certainly see (Inaudible)

Nick Baum - Google
Exactly, but for your own data and if you are interested in tracking things such as, how many items do I read a day or which are the feeds I read the most, you could do that with a little bit of figuring it out.

Jason Shellen - Google
It's also not a bad idea for a feature so maybe we should add in...

Nick Baum - Google
And that's another reason for an API red is that we have a limited amount of time, and so if other people can start playing with it, we'll see applications like that crop up very quickly.

Jason Shellen - Google
In our minds, it's a very good sign that people are demanding an API of our lab's product because it's not yet in a beta phase or publicly, widely available tab on the Google homepage. So, I think that's a good sign, that people are sort of clamoring for this.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
What's the reaction into the market place, it seemed pretty positive or at least with the latest update because -- two weeks, -- when was it, two weeks ago now, I mean the times gone so fast like you (Inaudible).

Jason Shellen - Google
Yup, run for two weeks, yeah.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
Two weeks ago, you guys came up with a pretty major update and that's the first one that caught my eye; on the first one, oh yeah, these guys have more work to do but the rest of the (Inaudible) is like wow! This is really good, it feels good to use her, which...

Nick Baum - Google
Yeah, no we've been really overwhelmed.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
Because I see Michael (ph) and other people reacted that way too, this was a release that people should start paying attention to.

Nick Baum - Google
The release has been really extremely successful and everybody has written very positive comments; people love the new features and a lot of people are starting to get into feed reading because of it I think. People are trying for the first time, to track websites using a feed reader.

Jason Shellen - Google
It's also getting some good exposure for features that we've been launching over the past two years, they weren't really noticed so, they added a 'Goodies' panel within Google reader and one of the features is the ability to drop a module onto your Google personalized homepage. It's a reader module and it's really well done. I feel like our engineering team like did a job on that, it just offers a really simple way to cruise through your reading list, alongside your stock information or your map's data or all the other stuff, or your Gmail inbox in just a really light-weight fashion then drill into Reader, if you want the full reading experience. The other one is the mobile UI I just really talked about, but all the people had no idea that we even had that mobile UI...

Nick Baum - Google
There's some fun comments and a few blogs are saying oh and its great and they have a brand new mobile UI, which has been out for a while.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
You guys are kicking out something, you guys -- Google is kicking out so many things that it's hard to keep track of them, you know and...

Jason Shellen - Google
We are trying to slow down, we're sorry.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
Go to the beach once in a while, the sites over half-way baked, come over and visit (Inaudible). Is anything else, you want me to know about Reader or Google because you've worked here fifteen years and this is my trip to Google, my first video trip at least. (Inaudible).

Jason Shellen - Google
Right, right. I see, sorry for bringing it up here.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
Please, you were on (Inaudible).

Jason Shellen - Google
But, we have seen you -- oh now we have a visitor, now I've to bring him onto the screen.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
It's Jeff (Inaudible).

Speaker
Come on then.

Speaker
Oh no, no, no.

Speaker
Jeff, come over here, get on the camera (Inaudible).

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
What have you been doing lately?

Speaker
Lots and lots of really interesting things, I can't really talk about right now.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
(Inaudible) anybody to talk.

Jason Shellen - Google
But, Google...

Speaker
I've seen all this stuff and its pretty good.

Speaker
What is he doing? Really what group is he on?

Jason Shellen - Google
So, he -- Jeff sold measure map to Google which was a blog Analytics company, so that's all I'll say.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
So, watching the future for General Analytics, right?

Jason Shellen - Google
Right, more graphs and numbers.

Speaker
This is good.

Speaker
That's a...

Jason Shellen - Google
So, what should we know about Google Reader, I don't know, I think you should know that -- well, right now we're happy that people are taking a liking to Google Reader and I don't know, continue to give feedback I think, that's been really important over the progress of this product.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
You guys have a blog where you can leave a comment, (Voice Overlap) where the features are right for you or whatever.

Speaker
Yeah.

Jason Shellen - Google
So, the team can subscribe the blog search feeds and everything, so...

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
So, you just have to say Google Reader and...

Jason Shellen - Google
Yeah, you say Google Reader anyone on your blog and -- or reference a post on googlereader.blogs.com or the discussion board...

Speaker
The Google groups.

Jason Shellen - Google
Yeah. So, the other thing one more, one more.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
One more? That's going to be like infamous...

Jason Shellen - Google
Right, we want a special message out to the people who have been with Google Reader since day 1, using the lens view. There's been some people saying like, "Hey, what are you doing to my reader, I really liked it the way that it was" and you should know that we're trying to find a way to make sure that we incorporate the best of that stuff into the new product and thank you so much for using it for so long. And if you haven't, go give it a try it's at google.com/reader.

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
Thanks a lot then.

Jason Shellen - Google
Nice being here, thanks again.