Beginning tomorrow, February 17th, FeedBurner members like myself will finally be able to see true subscription numbers from Google. The Google Reader team announced today that their crawler is now counting the number of Google users subscribed to a feed. This number will include subscribers from Google Reader itself as well as subscribers from Google’s Personalized Homepage, with the potential to include other Google products in the future. Up until this point, Google has only reported 1 subscriber, whether you had actually had 1 or 1,000 Google subscribers.
All I have to say about this is that its about time. I know for a fact that most of my subscribers (friends and co-workers at this point) use Google, either Reader of Personalized Homepage, so I am excited to see some accurately reported subscriber figures. Maybe I’ll even post them, provided they’re not too embarrassing. 