I don't understand your comparison. The advantage of google reader was that it was a web app? But every other webbased reader had the same advantage, and since Google Reader's demise, we got an explosion of amazing readers, from free over self-hosted to paid.
`Feeddemon and others` refer to regular applications (see http://www.feeddemon.com/). Google reader was, to my knowledge, the dominant feed reader back then even though other services existed (and filled up the space when GR was discontinued) and had that same advantage.
> The advantage of google reader was that it was a web app?
what I liked about Google reader was that I could subscribe to friends feeds, curated by what they decided what was worthwhile to share (from their own rss feeds, mostly comp.sci stuff).
and most importantly, that it did just that (if unasked) without getting all Facebooky, playing mind games etc to draw you into more "social" "engagement".
