Google keeps upping the ante with Google Reader. The latest addition is the trend page. This is really, really cool. The trend page gives you in chart and graphical format, a breakdown of your personal feed reading trends, which subscriptions are most often read, how many shares per feed, etc. Also available are frequently updated statistics for your set of feeds. Below is a quick chart of my reader habits for the last 30 days:

Usually, I average close to 400-500 feeds read per day, but this chart shows an average below that. December was a busy month off the web, I guess! The chart below has me a bit confused. I don’t remember spending so much time reading posts around midnight:

I suspect this reflects Pacific Standard Time (Google Time).

These stats are great to see on a regular basis. I wonder if they can split the data out to reflect what platform was used at which time. I do a lot of reading via my Palm 700p and the mobile version of Reader. With the EV-DO service on my Palm, nearly all downtime - like waiting in line at the grocery store - has turned into Google Reader time for me.

It seems like Google is spending a lot of time tweaking Reader, at the same time that some of it’s other offerings like Calendar and Notebook are getting stale. Hopefully the silence on those fronts reflects Google’s effort to put together a nicely Gmail integrated PIM offering (calendar, task manager, notebook, bookmarks, etc.). In the meantime I’m going dive into my own statistics and see how I can improve my reading habits.