After some time using liferea I switched to google reader for a number of reasons including:

Google Reader looked nice, it had a nice user experience, it's accessible from anywhere and not just from one workspace, ...

A while ago I learned from a collegue (gert) that there was a nice package in ubuntu called 'prism' with some other packages like:

• prism-google-reader
• prism-google-calendar
• prism-google-analytics
• ...

Prism is more or less a fully capable web browser but without all the fancy stuff, no plugins, no addons, no bookmarks, no nothing. This makes prism really fast and it is nicely integrated on the desktop as you can see in the next screenshot (though the fact I like the most is that it's far more faster reading posts then google reader in firefox).

Prism is a mozilla project (just like firefox, thunderbird and all the other mozilla projects) and you can find more info at the mozilla site.