I think Kobo were chasing the younger audience with the social sharing stuff; teenagers share everything on Facebook these days and they think it's just the normal thing to do. Whenever I've questioned sharing personal info in a public forum I get told "you don't get it, you're too old" (yes I do use Facebook but I spend more time playing games on it than anything else).
The reading awards are a new trend that you'll see more and more of in the future, it's called
gamification and it's a way to make a game out of things. Usually it involves doing different things in order to collect badges or awards and people that have the "gotta complete the collection" gene will go out of there way in order to get the complete set of awards. It's not really something that's all that new, years ago cigarette companies used to give away little cards in each pack of cigarettes and people would collect them and try to complete the collection.
The reading statistics are also a way to encourage people to read more, which can't be a bad thing, can it? Computers just make it easy to collect these sort of stats which in the past would have been difficult to collate (although I have heard of people that kept a record of every book they ever read).
Me? I'm not into sharing my reading with others, but the awards are just a fun thing and the statistics are interesting.