When Google unveiled the ‘Trends‘ statistical page for Google Reader a few months back, many people, including yours truly, postulated that it could be the first step towards a new killer-app; a kind of Digg-meets-Del.icio.us-meets-Google News.
Thanks to ‘Trends’ we know all the stats are in place. They know what you star, what you share, and what you read. But so far Google hasn’t done anything with this data besides present it to you in some simple graphs and tables. While these stats no doubt do help people eliminate feeds that they really don’t need in Reader (do you really need a feed if you read it less then 1% of the time?), this data is a potential goldmine and could mean so much more.

Think about it: while it’s nice to be able to subscribe to other Google Reader users’ shared items, even better would be a front page kind of like Digg-meets-Del.icio.us that presented you with the most-starred, most-shared, and most-read stories of the day, week, and month.
This would change absolutely nothing about the way Google Reader works right now, and if you didn’t want to see that data, you wouldn’t have to. Users would simply still go about their business starring, sharing, and reading stories, while Google rounds up the data to share with the collective. The collection could be kept anonymous so as not to influence your reading patterns.
Obviously a service like this, just as with all other social news aggregators, would have to worry about gaming of the system. If you think Google is immune to such tactics, look no further then the current Blogger controversy where data seems to show that Blogspot (owned by Google) names are by far the biggest home to splogs (spam blogs) on the Internet.
What would stop a spammer from say, signing up for a thousand different Google Reader accounts and starring each of their splogs to move them up the rankings? Google would need to start watching for suspicious behavior just like Digg does.
Still, in my mind the positives of such a service far outweigh the risks. A “Google Reader Trendsetter” (just throwing a name out there for you Google) service would be in a way a more natural Digg. Those who actually have accounts on Digg and sign in do so just to Digg (or bury for that matter) stories.
It’s well-known that Digg runs much faster if you’re not signed in, but if the numbers are to be believed, a million people still do it just to vote (and possibly get stories from friends). With Google Reader, you have to be signed in to read your feeds and the starring and sharing of stories is really kind of secondary to the actual reading of them. Compare this with Digg, where many claim that a lot of users don’t even read the stories they Digg.
As I said, the data is clearly already in place for Google Reader to showcase a ‘best of’ web feeds. I’m not sure why Google is dragging their feet in implementing this.