Leaked Google Reader Video – A Sign of FeedBurner Integration?

Google "mistakenly" posted a confidential video discussing Google Reader and some upcoming updates. Google Blogoscoped and Google Operating System each have overviews of the video content. Here are my views on a couple of the points from Blogoscoped’s analysis in the video:

"Very soon, Reader will recommend feeds to the user, based on previous subscriptions and other Google activity."

How will Google decide what to recommend? Will all of the 8 million indexed feeds be included in the recommendation engine? How will the engine deal with multiple content – i.e. where multiple blogs post about the same topic. Will Google use a Technorati-like authority ranking to decide who to recommend (i.e. Pagerank?). In this case, the big will get bigger and the new blogs will most-likely never be seen. Not crazy about that.

"The Reader team is going to integrate more social features."

This is great, will this replace the FeedBurner feedflare?

"Feeds are currently monetized by FeedBurner. Reader might be more directly monetized in the future, but Google wants to watch out showing ads next to other people’s content. This is a problem with Google News too."

I stick by what I have said since the FB acquisition. I do not want to lose the high CPMs and top quality advertisers that FB has. Moving from FB advertising to Google AdSense will hurt. But I do like the idea of being able to offer more advertising options within Google Reader. For example, if X publisher also uses AdSense, then they can select what ads to show inside the feeds. Feed Monetization will be 2008’s hot topic, mark my words.

My guess is that FeedBurner will integrate into Google fully within 6-9 months. Running FB separately does not make sense considering how hot feeds are and how important it is for Google to own the feed space both from the publishing and software (i.e. Reader) end.