According to reports of a video accidentally leaked from inside Google, the Google Reader developers have interesting plans for the future. While Scintilla works on a different scale from Google Reader (which is said to store “10 terabytes of raw data from 8 million feeds”) and also doesn’t aim for the same niche of general-purpose feed reader, there are proposals reported that would help aggregation sites like Scintilla, as well as several features that we’ve already implemented. Here’s a selection of the most interesting:

• Google will work on a standard for feed publishers to tell aggegrators about changes in the feed (‘this post has been deleted’, etc.). This will be really useful: at the moment Scintilla stores aggregated items even if they disappear from the original feed (we will of course manually delete an item if requested, but this inconvenience makes it harder for an author to retract a post when necessary). The way it works at the moment, if an item is updated in a feed within a week of the original creation date, the item will also be updated in Scintilla. Ideally authors should have control over how their content is aggregated elsewhere, and should be able to delete or make changes to that content at a later date as easily as possible.
• The Reader team is going to integrate more social features. Definitely a useful feature for allowing interesting, timely information to flow through social networks. Scintilla has a full social network of groups and individuals, through which information flows both manually (by recommending an item directly to a group or individual) or automatically (by Scintilla’s algorithmic recommendation of items, sources, groups and users based on item ratings and each user’s social network).
• Reader will recommend feeds to the user, based on previous subscriptions and other Google activity. While Scintilla’s user profiles aren’t yet integrated with activity on the rest of nature.com, Scintilla recommends sources based on common sources shared with other users. These can be found in the sidebar on the Manage Sources page.
• Google is interested in allowing users to comment on items they share. Scintilla deliberately doesn’t do this, believing that comments on articles should be collected in one place, at the original source. The groups and discussion forums at Nature Network, however, are always available for wider discussion of topics in the news.
• When searching in Reader, you may also get results from before you aren’t subscribed to anymore, or from your friends’ items. At the moment, searching in Scintilla is always global, but searching across just your saved sources – or those of your social network – is a useful feature that will hopefully be added to Scintilla in the future. Google’s on-the-fly Custom Search Engine feature could easily provide this in the short-term.
• Google wants to make publishing full articles in feeds more interesting to webmasters by creating ways to monetize them. Luckily a lot of scientific bloggers are able to see the benefits of including the full content in their feeds. This makes sure that their articles show up in saved searches across the content aggregated by Scintilla, and also allows Scintilla to display Adsense text ads (from Google) alongside their claimed content, if they desire. The revenue from these adverts goes solely to the authors – this process is described in more detail on the Information for Content Producers page.

According to reports of a video accidentally leaked from inside Google, the Google Reader developers have interesting plans for the future. While Scintilla works on a different scale from Google Reader (which is said to store “10 terabytes of raw data from 8 million feeds”) and also doesn’t aim for the same niche of general-purpose feed reader, there are proposals reported that would help aggregation sites like Scintilla, as well as several features that we’ve already implemented. Here’s a selection of the most interesting:

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