I'm interested in a reader that focuses on efficiency; like probably most people, no matter how much I try to cull them I end up with too many items in my list, more than I have time for.
Let's say it takes an average of 2.5 seconds to read a feed item subject line, decide whether to read it[0], and nothing else - not opening or reading any articles. In half an hour of concentration you could do that with ~700 feed items - again, without reading one article. Let's call 700 feed items a generous maximum; I doubt many will want to devote 30 minutes of their day only to reviewing feed items.
I end up with far more than 700 and I know I'm not the only one. How can I make it faster?
1. Obviously, the UI must not slow me down in any way.
2. Deduplication
3. Grouping of feed items covering the same topic. There may be dozens of items covering the march last weekend: If I don't want to read about it, I can ignore them en masse. If I do want to read about it, I can select the best looking feed item from the group and ignore the rest.
4. Display summaries instead of articles, at least optionally. If an item interests me, I can read the RSS summary and possibly save reading full articles that don't interest me or for which the summary contains the info I want.
... Is there a reader that does all that? Even if I have to pay for it? And it's still not enough; I doubt I could efficiently process all the items using only above. What else can be done?
[0] Source: I just timed myself doing that with 10 feed items in 26 seconds