Google Reader Love
I started using Google Reader last October, which is a little embarassing on several counts: first, I'd previously publicly said what a lousy application it was, second I was at the time working for a competitor, and third, I checked it out simply as a one or two week trial to see what all the fuss was about. I feel that you really can't give an accurate review of an aggregator unless you've lived with it for a week or so. It turns out that week never ended.
Unlike Shelley, I generally favor GR over Bloglines. I've never liked Bloglines' interface. I like the flattened view of folders. Google will import a hierarchical OPML and create a label for each folder - feeds in sub-folders get assigned one label for each level of the hierarchy. At first, I was frustrated by that, but eventually came to really like that. The thing is that almost every piece of metadata aggregators map onto feeds or posts - folders, clippings, ratings, flags, stars, etc. - all of these map onto tags (or labels, if you prefer). It's all a question of how you like to view it. The best part, though is that GR is fast. It loads quickly, you can scan through items quickly, unlike Bloglines (at least last time I looked), GR has a per-post view of read states, which is really nice. GR has a nice balance between a know-nothing view of read states, and a too-intrusive view - you don't have to mark everything read manually, but you it remembers where you left off reading.
There are a few bugs worth mentioning. First, it can't seem to figure out what to do with James Holderness' feed title, which actually is a common problem. It also doesn't fix up relative links, at least when the relative links are named anchors within the same document. And the Ajaxy goodness goes only so far, I frequently notice my read/unread count going awry, for instance. Speaking of read/unread states, it's difficult when I'm scanning articles to save one that I want to read in depth - sometimes I'm cruising through the articles and hit a big hairball of a post that I really want to read closely, but not right now. The best solution is to star the item and go back and read starred items later; the problem with me is remembering to do the second step.