The other features seem interesting.

Google Reader is the only online reader I know, never had a reason to try another reader

I really like the idea of recommending feeds to readers based on what they have read before. Kind of like Amazon’s “Customer who looked at this also looked x”. It’s not perfect but sometimes it’s works well.

This business is stepping towards a more disciplined approach and is about to get VERY serious.

It sounds similar to the auditing processes print publishers were forced to subject themselves to several years ago.

This is to be expected, if the blogging industry wants to continue to attract the serious advertising budgets from the “big end of town”.

Google is as much a pawn in this process as us mere mortals, in that, if they wish to maintain their dominant market position and cash flow, they have to prove that real peoples purchasing decisions can be influenced using their resources.

Maybe (big hope) it will help side line the cowboys creating non commercial swarms of “Get Rich Quick” inducing traffic.

Taking ProBlogger as an example, if people leave comments on Scoble’s shared items (for ProBlogger posts), there’s a lesser chance for the blogger to gain feedback from the readers. Of course, not all blogs work this way but I’d rather have at my blog the comments that are directed to my posts.

BTW, I wrote more on this in a post on the same topic.

I’m fairly sure that most of the time, “leaked content” is only a clever mean of building hype around a project..

Everyone does it, so why not google?