Google Reader is really dominating in the world of RSS readers, but if you're looking for a desktop experience that has the best of what Google Reader offers, but a faster and more desktop-like experience on Windows, you definitely need to check out FeedDemon.
The latest version of FeedDemon, newly release 3.1 offers some serious performance improvements from 3.0, which was a feature release that included Google Reader synchronization as its major point of interest. FeedDemon 3.1 also includes a new Shared By People I Follow feature, which brings Google Reader's shared items functionality into FeedDemon.
You can now also filter the posts in the feeds that you are subscribed to based on keywords. You can show posts only if they include certain keywords, or filter out posts if they include certain keywords. This can make subscribing to a very busy feed more manageable because you can completely hide the content you are not interested in seeing.
FeedDemon 3.1 brings serious performance and social improvements
