Google Reader

Earlier this year, I was reading about 100 feeds in Google Reader. When I went on vacation for a few weeks, I cut back to about 30 feeds. But I thought I’d be smart about the 70 feeds that I stopped reading. Instead of unsubscribing from those 70 feeds completely, I made an “unread” folder and moved the feeds to the “unread” folder. Why? Well, I figured that at some point, I might be able to go back and catch up on all the unread items that I’d missed in those 70 feeds.

Not too long ago, I did try to go back and catch up on all those unread items in Google Reader. Hooray! But there was a problem: it looks like if you don’t read an item within 30 days or so, the item automatically gets marked as read in Google Reader. So for those 70 feeds, I lost a few months of potentially interesting items.

I spend a lot of time in Google Reader every day, and I really love it (and the Google Reader team!). It’s rare that I discover something like the “silently mark an item as read after 30 days” surprise. So I started making a list of all the little features that I might want in Google Reader. Just to be clear, I haven’t talked to the Reader team at all about their planned features or roadmap, so this is just a personal list that I came up with myself. What feature would you most want to see in Google Reader?