I love Google Reader, but given the number of users and feeds it has and the smarts of the team it should be able to: 1) Tell me what other items in my feeds link to the same story: help me manage my attention. 2) Support smart folders: Outlook and Newsgator have 'em. Gmail (via Quick Links) does too. Why not Reader? 3) Search unread items: you can search read items now, but not unread. I want to be able to say search for all items about X and mark them as read. What else? - Steve Rubel

Agree and I have to add that the social features suck currently: sharing by making chat contacts is @#%&*. - Nikos Anagnostou

I would like it to de-duplicate posts that somebody shares which I am already subscribed to. They should mention "this has been shared by ...." on one instnace of the post instead of showing me the post N number of times. - Brian Sloane

I like Reader, but the folks over at Feedly are doing much more to extend and improve the product than the folks at Google. - Robert Clockedile

Steve already mentioned it. But filtering items linking to the same story would be great. I'm getting annoyed when there is one story going around and every blog or website seems to write a post on it. But I know new other reader which is able to do this. Would be really a time saver. - Matthias Faller

Problem is, Rob, you need a plug in. - Steve Rubel from IM

Agreed. It won't work for everybody, but it's got an excellent (and growing) set of features, including beta Ubiquity integration. - Robert Clockedile from twhirl

...I know, I know...another plug in. - Robert Clockedile from twhirl

This is probably a silly question but is there a way to see a list of every reader-article that I've emailed out to either myself or friends?? - Will DeLuca

I love Google Reader. I would like to be able to choose my page view. When I click to read an article the page is adapted for mobile phone, I would like to view in HTML. I know of no way to change this. It would be nice to be able to choose. - Elizabeth

Google has a Digg competitor right in it's midst. I should be able to see most stared and most shared stories for the day, week, month etc. - Tim

The one thing I want with Google Reader is the ability to hide shared items from specific sources (source of that wishlist item? FF, of course). - Tamar Weinberg

I also love reader, but I would *love* to be able to setup rules to mark feeds with certain tags read once they become so old. For instance, I have feeds tagged as news and news-slow. Anything in news is stale after about 6 hours, anything in news-slow after about 2 days. I want to setup those preferences in Reader and have it mark those items as read for me, because going through yesterday's breaking news is a pain in the neck. - FFing Enigma (aka Tina)

I like those suggestion Steve! Some of them are also applicable to feedly and the crowd we are catering. Thanks for kicking off this conversation! (Rob thanks for the support!) - Edwin Khodabakchian

I would love for Google Reader to flag duplicate news stories as well, Steve. - Liana Lehua

I wish they'd add Gtalk like in gmail. And adding friends/sharing has to be improved. I've also been unimpressed with search in greader. - Graham English

Merge Google Reader and Google Bookmarks ! - Stanislas Jourdan

Hmm, I wonder if Google Bookmarks is dying too. It was integrated with Notebook. - Steve Rubel from IM

My guess is that google has hired the founder of delicious to try to do something big and consistent around tagging and bookmarking. Something that could tie together Chrome, Android, Google Bookmarks, Google Reader. At least this is what I am hoping. The fragmentation is pretty painful for the end user. - Edwin Khodabakchian

Bookmarks sync is central to Chrome so somehow I think it will survive and become more social - Steve Rubel from IM

greader and gmail should merge. Both emails and feeds are easy to manage and access with the help of filters and labels. Email is a good tool to share with a wide variety of social networks. - xavier vespa

the shared items doesn't have the proper rss feed format. Can't use it elsewhere without it getting all monkeyed up.. Also a mark as unread option. Themes seems a direction it should soon incorporate. A piping feature like Yahoo Pipes offers. - Mike Skramstad

I love reader, but duplicates haven been driving me NUTS recently. I've recently started using Yahoo Pipes to combine some of of my feeds that commonly duplicate stories into one feed and remove duplicates. - Steve Boerner

Greader needs to be integrated with gmail. - Russ Jackson

one of my most desired options is to be able to sort my feeds by unread count, regardless of what folders they're in... so I get just a big list of all the feeds I'm subscribed to in order from feeds with 1 or 2 unread stories all the way to the feeds with 1000+ unread - I mentioned this to Edwin at Feedly and he seems keen to add into their product soon: http://getsatisfaction.com/feedly... - It's amazing to me that Google Reader doesn't offer that option already. - Nathan Chase

Getting the duplicate stories out will be a little tough - especially if the feed you subscribe to doesn't link back to their source - but it can definitely be done... would just have to do some regex/fuzzy logic-type querying of post title, content, and outbound links on the page to determine a percentage of similarity. You could then have a similarity threshold slider to adjust your "duplicate filter". - Nathan Chase

Are there perhaps other readers which do some of these? - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)

I use reader heaps, but I'd still love more features! - Will Higgins™

I'd like to save my searches in greader. - Wallace

I, too, would like a pony with my gReader. - David Chartier from BuddyFeed

I would NOT want gmail and greader combined, but better social features in the sidebar would be nice. Also improve tagging and let me set time based rules. I like yahoo pipes, though I'm not sure google would want to add something like it as a feature of reader, but I would like a pony. - John

I agree, the pony seems obvious, and it's certainly within Google's power to provide one for everyone. - Michael C. Harris

The ability to offer 3rd party features is exactly what the purpose of the soon_to_be_launched "Google reader API", as discussed by Niall Kennedy, is. His post: http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog... There is also an unofficial reverse engineering project here: http://code.google.com/p... - coldbrew

Duplicates within Reader are annoying. There is a script that helps with this but it's not great. It's certainly one problem with GR that needs looking at. - Kol Tregaskes

On my Google Reader wish list: 1. smart recommender system for news of personal relevance 2. incremental search of subscriptions in left column 3. incremental search of unread items in right column, both for All items and in each folder 4. rename folders 5. delete folders 6. easier moving of folders and feeds from one location to another (perhaps cut and paste) 7. seamless integration with Friendfeed. - Sean McBride

I'd like greader to be smart enough to know I already read a post - at the site, via an aggregator or ... No time for ponies - MaryAnn Chick Whiteside

Plus could it stop letting me subscribe twice to the same feed :) - MaryAnn Chick Whiteside

@mcwflint if you are a firefox user and install the feedly extension, you can configure feedly mini to mark articles as read in Google Reader when you visit websites directly. - Edwin Khodabakchian

Thanks. I'll try it on the non iPhone days - MaryAnn Chick Whiteside

This one would be useful: "search for all items about X and mark them as read." I like the search feature in Google Reader. When I notice an interesting news about a subject, I immediately search for it to read what has been said about it in my other feeds. 2 or 3 articles are usually more than enough to know more about it, so it would be really useful to be able to mark all the others as read. - Mehdi Trimech

I'm loving Feedly so far. The fact that it is a plugin is very beneficial when you are generally surfing (not reading RSS), and you auto-discover the relevant conversations to join in on. Obviously Google will do something soon that will take me back to Reader, but for now I'm going to use Feedly - Paul R. Grant

Feedly's picture grid view is awesome, but the fact that I can't mark items as unread keeps me from using it fulltime. Some innovation in the way feeds are displayed would add a lot to Google Reader. Here's some idea - picture grid (ala feedly), timeline, contextual view (grouped by content like videos, links, etc) - Ashish Bogawat