Google Reader has come a long ways since October 2005.

Those using Feedburner might already have noticed a nice little jump in subscribers and upon further investigation seen that “Google feedfetcher” is now reporting back RSS subscriber numbers.

The Google Reader blog explains:

This is something we’ve been wanting to do for a while, but with all the products that use feeds at Google, corralling the data in one place was like herding cats. So herd we did, and as of today, our crawler reports the number of Google users subscribed to the feed. The count includes subscribers from Google Reader and the Google Personalized Homepage, and in the future may include other Google products that support feeds.

This doesn’t impact Hmm really as we only use Feedburner for most of the category RSS feeds. We use our own server stats for the main, search by keyword and comments RSS feeds. Our VTOR blogging group uses Feedburner for the main feed and we noticed a nice 30% jump in subscribers when Google started sharing this data.

Lately, I’ve beeen reading a lot of people saying positive things about Google Reader and this no doubt will lure a few more folks away from Bloglines. I’m pretty happy with the RSS reading experience I’ve been experimenting with this year but see one major weakness: offline. I don’t know what Google Reader does about offline sync and options, if anything, but my current RSS reading setup falls apart if I don’t have internet access. I would like to come up with one master export for my unread feeds that my Pocket PC, PSP, Zune or other portable device can slurp down quickly and easily.

Then again I can live without RSS when I’m away from keyboard and internet, so maybe getting the news in other ways like listening to satellite or terrestrial radio can and will fill the gap just fine.

Speaking of getting away from the keyboard and being unable to access your Google Reader RSS feeds will any readers be taking part in shutdown day? We have shutdown days around here by unplugging whenever we take a vacation.

• Recommend a good offline RSS aggregator?
• Feedburner not disallowing use of deleted feeds to third parties?
• How to migrate existing feeds to Feedburner (Apache)
• Cologne CD in video game magazine
• Feedburner stats in XML or XHTML
• Feedburner won’t burn users on the way out