Liferea is a fantastic Feed Reader written in Gtk+. Its lightweight, yet has lots of features. Its not officially part of the Gnome project, but is very related to Gnome -- probably the most well integrated reader for Gnome. I propose to integrate Liferea with Google Reader.

Use Case 1: Most people use their computer from multiple locations, and would like to synchronize their reading lists. Using Google reader to maintain the synchronized list, is a very ideal situation. Consider this: at home, you'd like the convenience of a well integrated, lightweight feed reader. At office, you might not be able to install new software, so a web based reader suits you pretty well.

Use Case 2: Apart from that, using Google Reader as a backend can save bandwidth, and minimize total update time: since now I need to act only if Google tells me a post is updated. In fact downloading a single stream from the Google Reader backend will tell me which are the feeds that have been updated, and what the changes are. Compare this to current readers, where if I have hundred blogs on my reading list, each one needs to be fetched, even if some of them are updated rarely. After my project, every update of all of these hundred feeds will make _exactly one download_ !

Use Case 3: Also, many people including myself, like the "Share a post" feature of Google reader. I would like to be told when a friend of mine shares a post, and would also like to share posts that I read.

Liferea currently has read-only support for Google reader. This means I can't update the "Read" status for a post.

My approach as to how to "integrate" Google Reader, is different and elegant, and I'm really hoping you will consider my project.