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?

What Google Reader feature do you want to see?

• From my feeds, suggest new feeds for me to read
• Let me drag/drop to rearrange feeds
• Let me subscribe to password-protected feeds
• Show me a “Google News” for the blogosphere, maybe with voting
• Seamless offline feed reading
• From the items I’ve read, suggest new interesting items
• For a single blog post, show me related blog posts
• Bookmarklet to star/share things on the web, not just in my feeds
• Let me click to rename feeds
• If I share an item, include my tags in the shared feed
• Expand 30 day window on unread items to 90 days
• Give me a start page with drag & drop like iGoogle
• Slick/cool UI for iPhones
• More blogroll customization options
• Let me add/customize the links at the bottom of each item

View Results

I’m sure I missed some good suggestions. What features would you want to see in Google Reader? Remember, this is just an informal poll. I’m sure the Reader team is busy; I was personally just curious what Google Reader features people would want.