As part of my continuing quest for the ultimate aggregator I've been using Google Reader a bit – although I haven't replaced Bloglines yet.

Firstly, the good things: I generally like the feel of the “lens” part of the UI. The scrolly headline box thing is nice (although there should be a delay when you stop on an item before it gets marked as read). It's good to see that Google hasn't gone down the whole “sharing lables as tags” thing – tags are useful when you primarily tag something for yourself. (The whole “tagging for other people” thing leads to spam [1].) It isn't clear exactly what use the lables have yet, though.

Despite those things, I can't use it as my main aggregator. The one feature I need is a “view new items by author” view. The “Your Subscriptions” page almost has the elements on it – it needs to bold feeds with new item and put a count of the new items next to them.

[1]: I've been meaning to write on that – del.icio.us tags are useful because they benefit from people's selfishness; ie, people want to find something in their own bookmarks. Technorati tags aren't as useful because the only reason to use them is to benefit other people. See the use of HTML meta tags circa 1997 and how what happened to them..