Josh Bancroft’s TinyScreenfuls.com

Google Reader Trends, originally uploaded by Josh Bancroft.

This is a really, really cool tool!

In a recent blog post on the Google Reader blog, Googler Mihai Parparita introduces the latest feature to Google Reader (which I’ve been using as my main RSS reader for months now) - Trends.

You can see which of your feeds update most often, or least often (with a handy “unsubscribe” icon next to each one for cleaning out stale feeds). There’s a graph of your reading activity over the last month, or by hour, or by day (see when you spend the most time reading feeds). And there’s a tagcloud that shows which of your tags/folders has the most activity. (Click the image above to see the screenshot full size and more readable.)

Bloglines doesn’t offer anything near this cool - a feature gap that creates an opportunity for them to try to win back old fans like me. I still love you guys - let’s see what you’ve got!

i’m going to dig in now, and see what interesting data I can glean from this. Here is a summary of my last 30 days of reading:

From your 592 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 24,718 items, starred 48 items, and shared 0 items.

I can also already see very clearly that I read way too many feeds late at night.

If you use Google Reader, there should be a link to the new Trends feature on your “Home” page, or you can just click this link. If you don’t use Google Reader, why the heck not?

Thanks Google Reader Team!