[1] - I realise the irony in complaining about not wanting social news yet still following personal blogs, but they're a known quantity. If I want socially filtered news I'll go browse Reddit.
There are companies along this line[1], but I'd prefer a solution with just rss usage/content data, and not the social streams as well.
[1] Prismatic and Percolate come to mind
The large number of vocal people complaining specifically about how much worse Google+ is than the old reader sharing system (search for "sharebros" or http://www.buzzfeed.com/robf4/googles-lost-social-network) would suggest this is not true.
With the exception of hardcore introverts, most people like the idea of sharing - but only when it's actually doing something they like rather than the gamified meaningless actions Google is chasing right now.
See the recent stories about LinkedIn blasting out stuff to every contact in an address book or the historical fubars of Facebook changing defaults on the fly.
It just means you want good social software rather than things designed for advertisers. The original Google Reader sharing model was exactly what you describe: use it in private until you choose to share something.
So my thought was not 'sharing' in the sense of having your friends know you just read an article on TechCrunch, rather that you and your friends characterize the TechCrunch feed as '"news", "gossip", "opinion" => related to (startups)' so that when I or they start reading other things that are 'related to (startups)' the reader could mention or perhaps occasionally inject articles into that 'feed/grouping' (Pandora has the notion of a 'radio station' which is similar).
Basically the extent of your "sharing" with the rest of the community (with respect to the reader) is that you think agree that TechCrunch is about startups. The community helps create the taxonomy of the feeds they are reading so that the reader can know if some feed that one person is reading might be of interest to someone who is reading feeds that are similar to that. (with no knowledge about who is reading those other feeds, just that the the other person has the same sort of interests you have expressed for a feed)
I'm going to assume the app adds on to every article the familar /tweet/share/like/etc tags so if you are a social media engaged person you can push it out to your social media stream as well.
Even though I am "stuck in the 70's" in my music tastes according to my wife I enjoy the music Pandora finds for me on my originally 'bands from the 70's' radio station.
The only thing reader seemed to be missing for me was a way to discover new blogs to follow. That function is being provided a bit by HN these days but its hit or miss.
You might like Prismatic: http://getprismatic.com/news/home
* View basic information about your account
* Manage your data in Google Reader
* View your email address
* Manage your contacts
* Perform these operations when I'm not using the application
With https://intigi.com, we've done just this, intake content from both social (Twitter) and RSS feeds. With Twitter, we index the full text of any linked article and make the text fully searchable. The full text provides much more data for us to search and also is a great way of deduplicating content (i.e., Tweets linking to the same article).