Around the end of last year/the start of this year, ideas started creeping up around the web about how Google Reader, with a few simple tweaks, could become a potential Digg-killer. Users of Google Reader already ’star’ and ’share’ items and Google keeps track of this data for the personalized ‘Trends’ area of Google Reader – so why not open up the data and showcase what items are most starred and shared web-wide? Well, it appears the Google Reader application on Facebook has beaten Google to the punch. Users of the application can now see ‘Top Shared Items‘, a truly awesome first step.

I say first step, because at this point the application is only able to pull in data from other Facebook users who have installed the Google Reader app (it also has an option to easily see your friend’s shared items). Also, though you can switch to see the ‘Top Shared Items’ of the past 12-hours, 24-hours, 48-hours, or Week, you still can only view the top 10. If this data was expanded beyond the top 10, it would be more useful.

Why Google hasn’t yet done something like this is completely beyond me. As I said, everything appears in place for them to fairly easily implement this (and clearly if a developer not getting paid for their time can do it for Facebook, can’t one making the big bucks do it for Google?) – so what is holding them back? My feeling is that it points to a larger Google has: for everything they are good at, they simply are not very good at anything on the social tilt.

One easy remedy would be for Google to buy Facebook, but as I’ve written numerous times on numerous sites, I don’t see why they simply can’t get their social act together by themselves.

Google: open up your Google Reader data and at least let us see what items are getting shared the most in Google Reader. This is such a huge idea/feature and you are letting a 3rd party app – on a completely different site (Facebook) – school you in it. You’ve been warned.