gmail was pretty crappy for a week and a bit for me. Hard to sell me on the idea of an online life when service outages can just take everything away. At least with desktop tools I can see offline content.If google or someone else could create an online store for feeds, and read vs unread items that I can synch from my desktop(s) that would be useful. On the road provide a nice UI. Perhaps google reader already does this. Don't know since I haven't checked it out. As far as authenticated feed handling goes, I hope that if they add that feature, they handle it correctly. Some sites authenticate their feeds because it is a pay-for service. Google reader needs to consider the share feature in light of that.
Re: online only. With my new "business class" mobile phone (and, er, my grandfathered unlimited data Fido account), there are very limited places where I am truly "offline". I agree that more offline or synch services are warranted…but we're still in early days for feed reading in general.
Troy Angrignon and
Paul Kedrosky have some offline/online thoughts lately.Your point about "sharing" of for-pay features is, I think, the same as for any other reader: I can easily re-post or otherwise share that content.
I actually was checking out the