Fundamentally, Google Reader views RSS as email. But…

RSS is not email.

Disagree.

So there’s two types of people. Some people subscribe to things because they want to read every item and they desire the organization that comes with an unread count (and don’t want to waste time searching for where they previously left off). Other people subscribe to way too much stuff, skim it, miss lots of stuff (and potentially waste time searching for where they left off).

I strongly prefer the Google Reader behavior to that of Twitter or Tumblr.

Saying that one group is using the technology incorrectly is just silly. These services should all offer the option of keeping track of unread items that can be enabled/disabled based on the user’s preference.

I almost (okay, not really) gave up on Twitter due to the sheer frustration of having to relocate my last read tweet when changing devices (which I do multiple times per day). I finally ended up switching to Echofon, a slightly clunky Twitter client, solely because it syncs my last read tweet across devices.