Dave Winer makes some telling observations about Google's new reader:

I tried the Google news reader again, this morning, after it had loaded all my feeds (it seems to take quite a few hours to do that).This is the second blog-related product they've come out with recently that appears not to have been touched by human beings before it was introduced to the world (the other was the ridiculous blog search). I think they need to start using their own stuff before releasing it. And maybe look at the competition for ideas.

The emphasis above was added by me - I think that Dave hits it right on the nose there. BottomFeeder may not be perfect, but I use it myself everyday - eating your own dogfood is critical with customer facing software. It would be very interesting to see just how much user testing this tool got. As I said earlier, I don't think people like me are their primary target. Having said that, I'm not sure which target would actually find this tool usable right now.