For a long time I used Thunderbird as my main feed reader. It's main advantage compared to other tools is that instead of displaying just the the text of a feed item, it renders the whole item using the Firefox engine. Therefore the layout of the site which you subscribe to is not getting lost. However once I joined SAP last year I had to switch to something else because I wanted to check my feeds in the office and at home. Since I heard good things about Google Reader I gave it a go and I am still happy with my decision.

There are lots of things I like about Reader. One thing which stands out for me is how easy it is to send items you like to your friends via email. Another thing which is a neat idea are the so called shared items. It means that while I am skipping through my feeds I can mark anything interesting as shared. All my shared items end up in an extra feed + an extra website. You can check out my feed here and my website here. Why is this cool? It allows you to subscribe to items which were already marked as interesting by people you know and trust. Similar to what the people over at Digg are doing.