I wish a real competitor would have emerged earlier, honestly, if only to get the Google Reader team to do something interesting. The truth is that Reader has been the de facto standard, but ugly, clunky, and with a somewhat random and randomly expanding feature set.

I've tried everything else in the vain hope that it'd be better, but nothing ever is.

To me, this seems like the worst time to try to compete. Google's entering a user-focused phase, with changes that are largely better for most people. Are the obstinate change-hating refugees really the user base you want?

how do you rope up all the hardcore google reader users into one place, and get them to share with one another.

This doesn't make any sense to me. Even hardcore google reader users have, I imagine, very different interests. Why would you assume they automatically make up some sort of community?

G+ seems like a much better platform to make communities on top of, since you can easily direct your content.

Also, it seems like Google+ is becoming a platform. If Reader becomes an RSS wielding inteface for that, I imagine they'll release public APIs on top of which it would be easy to make an alternative UI.

There's always been a competitor that, IMHO, blows Reader out of the water, yet it doesn't have a behemoth behind it to support and push it to the masses.

It's called Newsblur, and I'm getting closer to paying for the premium version each time I use it.

The amount of RSS readers that support google reader is crazy. I use Feedly on the laptop and Reeder on iOS, they both support sharing with a couple dozen different services, have amazing interfaces, and feedly has great discovery tools for finding new blogs. I don't see the point of switching since I haven't logged into reader.google.com in ages (the last time was to export a couple folders and send it to some friends).

Use Newsblur and Pinboard, the only two real competitors out there whenever someone comes up looking for replacement for GR or Delicious....as per HN of course!