Among all Google services Reader could be the only one for me that doesn't have a good alternative. I can use Bing for searching, Outlook for mail, BingMaps for maps etc but when it comes to an RSS Reader I don't know any good service out there with the same functionality as GReader. Yes, there are some popular services like Feedly and Flipboard but they seem like a newspaper and are only good for reading handful of articles and not very useful for skimming hundreds or thousands of them. Google Reader is very good for this, but it has few shortcomings, like you have to mark all the post from a source as read without leaving half of them as unread, this is fine as long as there are only 40-50 posts, but what about if there are hundreds of them. Another problem with Google Reader is there are too much white space, even if you choose compact view.
Luckily for us there are userscripts to solves these problems.
This is the default state.

Userscripts:

For selective marking I recommend "Mark previous as read"
For extra white space there are two userscripts: "Google Reader Fixes" and "Google Reader Absolutely Customizable". You can install both of them.
After you install all of these userscripts Google Reader will look as above, with much more content on screen.
Bonus script: Google Reader Unread Count, by default you cannot see how many unread posts you have, this script will show you the exact count.
Note that you need GreaseMonkey addon installed beforehand on Firefox to install these scripts. If you are using Chrome you don't need GreaseMonkey, it supports userscripts by default, but you cannot install them from 3rd party sources like userscripts.org. To do that you should add the following argument to your on your Chrome shortcut in where it says target "--enable-easy-off-store-extension-install" just after chrome.exe.

also: my wishlist for GoogleReader

A few days ago Google changed the appearance of Google Reader in line with its other services, they also removed some of the social elements while at the same time integrating it more tightly with Google+. I was hoping that they would add some features as well but sadly they didn't. And of all the Google services including search and Gmail, Reader is the one I spend most of my time.

So here are my wish list from Google developers for Google Reader:

Advanced Analytics: There are over 300 subscriptions in my account and naturally I don’t have time to read most of them. It would be nice to know to which feed providers I pay most and least attention. So that I will be able to clean some of them. Google has all this information.

Intelligent Favorites Folder: Based on analytics data and interactions with posts (starring, sharing etc.) I want to see my favorite providers first in random order. If you select all items and then sort feeds by magic, it randomizes your feeds by some algorithm but it is far from what I want. Just look at the picture below. Of over 300 feed providers GReader shows me only feeds from Engadget when I sort by magic. And as you can see Engadget posts frequency is extremely high.

Theme Support: Gmail has themes, so why not Google Reader. I can always use extensions and user scripts but I don’t want to use third party tools for a very basic feature like this.

Similar People: Based on subscribed feeds Google may recommend people to follow on Google+.

Advanced Sorting Options: Right now you can only sort feeds by source, tags, time and whether they are read or not. You can not view your starred posts from specific feeds, you can not view posts from certain dates.

What are your wishes?