It's really hard to build an ecosystem when you have to complete again a "good enough" free google reader.

I'm paying for my google reader replacement now, and fairly happy about it.

Unfortunately, a lot of blogs have shut down from a loss of traffic.

Also, Google Reader's "sort by magic" worked incredibly well at giving me something interesting to look at, and not just the most popular things. Can Feedly finally do something like that? Last time I checked, all the Google Reader replacements either hadn't tried, or were suffering from a vastly reduced userbase that didn't care about the same blogs I did.

Better than Reader was in the end, but when reader allowed you to see what your reader friends were reading, that was the peak.