I've ended up replacing Google Reader with Twitter.

I follow all the people I care to read about -- they tweet their blog postings as they're posted. I follow Techmeme -- they tweet their river of news. I aggressively unfollow or disable retweets for any followed account with a poor signal/noise ratio.

I supplement that with an occasional glance at Google Plus (where the Android/Google-centric like to post updates). If I'm really behind, I just visit http://techmeme.com/river and catch up.