Maximum PC

I'm on the hunt for a new RSS aggregator. Google Reader is a trusty ole friend, but recently has given me cause to break up for good. There are more fish in the Internet sea than just Google and the top ten readers, but I've got an idea of where to start. The first step is to figure out what website has a complete listing of RSS aggies. http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php has one of the biggest lists. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aggregator has a ton listed as well.

My next step is to make a list of wants and do-not-wants. I like most of the features of Google Reader, so it will be the de facto gold standard. I want people to be able to read my comments on articles easier. This means a more blog-like display of articles I've faved, shared, and added notes to.
-Articles and comments will be searchable by user tags and keywords.
-Articles will be sortable by date or name, especially by oldest first (Google Reader limits you to the last 30 days).
-There should be little numbers at the bottom of every page for navigation by a range of articles, as well as forward/back links (Google Reader forces readers to click "see more Buzz" every single time. With long load times and a specific article in mind this gets annoying quickly).
-A popularity meter. This could be page hits, reader ratings, number of times linked to, etc.
-A link back to a main profile in author view (Google buries the link somewhere in Reader settings).
-It should be able to display comments only, and to "see all posts by user," to seperate article content from user comments.
-It would be nice if it had a way to import all posts I've written in Google Reader, but not necessary (I've written like 300 comments over 5 months).
-Integration with Google Buzz would still be nice.
-The aggregator should have a big user base, so that a lot of people will read, rate, and respond to my comments.

With my goals in mind, I'll start with the aggs used most often. This usually means Google Reader, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and Delicious.

Reditt can sort of kind of function as an aggregator, but it's still pretty limited. Reditt is basically a bulletin board with user voted web links. You can befriend posters just like with Buzz, and subscribe to their posts. But you cannot subscribe to a specific domain, which means if you wanted to read the articles that are published daily from say Maximumpc.com, a reader or website owner would need to post every single article individually. Like Buzz, you can comment on other people's posts, and sorting of comments and links is superb. The user base is huge. In my slow-computer-at-work trial, the loading times were extreeeeemely long when compared with Google Reader. A lot of the content on the uncustomized front page is nizzfoo. You'll need to pick friends and articles to build up a more boss-friendly frontpage. I guess the best thing it's good for is finding new sites and networking with people who want more than just RSS articles (because you can post regular hotlinks too). Reditt helps uncover content you wouldn't normally get by reading the same feeds every day.

Digg is a lot like Reditt, so I'll try not to repeat myself too much. Like Reditt, Digg is a community links bulletin board, it can't act like an RSS, and it helps discover new articles. Digg is faster than Reditt. Digg's ads are way worse than Reditts. They're on the top banner, on the sides, and in the middle of normal diggs, so you can't filter them out with AdBlock. Unlike Reditt, Digg has a negative filter for diggs, meaning everything belongs in a category and you can choose to have those categories not displayed on your front page. The default Digg page is more SFW than Reditt, and they have a stricter policy about links for NSFW stuff. I don't care if it was a temporary thing or not, but even with the negative category filter, Digg put up these big unremovable diggs at the top of the home page that are sent to everyone. They also do this constantly with a default sidebar of "top in all categories." I don't know if you can remove that or not. Probably not. Even Google doesn't harass me that much with their recommended RSS feeds. Unlike Reditt, I don't think you can create your own group or category. Everything goes in the preset Digg categories. The interface is slicker than Reditt, but the ads make it worse than Reditt overall (I'm rating all of these sites in their default state, without AdBlock).

Well, well, well. With the announcement of the cancellation of Google Reader, it would appear my initiation of this thread has become more pertinent.

My initial feeling is that I should go with Blogger, since it is already a part of Google. I'm dropping the earlier requirement I mentioned of backwards compatibility, and only posit that it must work on Vista or newer with any browser supported by those OSes (I use Win7 x64 with Google Chrome Canary). I'm going to keep looking for an RSS aggregator that matches or exceeds Google Reader's features.