Tried three new RSS feed readers tonight - Comma Feed, Feedly, and The Old Reader.
Stu suggested Comma Feed to me. Its layout is ok, keyboard shortcuts work and I could rearrange my feeds, but I couldn't figure out how to not automatically mark things read as you scrolled past them. But it was super sluggish with its response times and it also hung in my browser - flash crashed or something. If it keeps doing that it'll be unusable.
Feedly rated highly in LifeHacker a while back. I could rearrange feeds pretty easily, but the default layout is terrible (I like full articles - but to get full articles you have to click on that option for every feed - super annoying - and it's just inconsistent). It imported pretty much everything as read, which didn't give me a lot to work with in terms of usability. So far I hate it.
The Old Reader is my favourite of the three. It's designed on Google's feed reader from a couple of generations ago. Settings for not auto marking things read and keyboard shortcuts work, and those settings are retained between feeds.
Will keep up all three for the rest of the week, see how they behave.
I really think this could be the beginning of the end for Google. How are they ever going to get market share on a product when the market simply doesn't trust them not to pull the service after a couple of years?
Natto
Im planning on trying Feedly to start with when the day comes. I'm pretty annoyed at Google for pulling Reader but hopefully I can find a good replacement and care more about moving from something that works and the search rather than dumping Google in search for alternatives.