I have become increasing disillusioned with RSS feeds.  In particular, their ability to handle information updates and content filtering is particularly poor.

It is a failure of the RSS readers available today; clients do not permit the complex, heuristic behavior that is necessary.  RSS feeds are simply putting WAY TOO MUCH information available online, and simply downloading, and displaying this XML data is not enough.  Nor is simple keyword search.

When an article is updated on a blog, RSS feeds typically reflect these changes, and reissue new ‘items’ that are displayed to the client.  Updated data is displayed as “new” content yet again – really pesky.

The development of richer information management systems on the client side, with integrated server-based support (ie. Your filters and their behaviour are synchronized to a centralized server, allowing you to read your news in a web browser, OR with a fat client) is absolutely critical if RSS is to become more popular.