Glassdog's Ponyboy rants on lack of imagination in webfeed readers. Nicely supports the previous post. Any regular reader of this fine site knows that we here at New Media Hack are already so there.
The commentary against is of the usual sort. "Only infopornorgrapher's want that." "It's harder than it looks." "Put up or shut up." All of these points are valid concerns, but don't invalidate the premise. Emacs isn't for everybody, and it was one hell of a thing to build, but it makes a certain class of hackers better, who subsequently make lots of good stuff. An overall win for society. Plus, some of the fundamental design principles of Emacs, e.g. damn good regular expressions all over, embedded scripting language, have withstood the test of time.
While the Ponyboy's writing blaming the problem on inhuman programmers is quite entertaining, the whole dustup argues for a major experiment. If there was an Emacs of aggrgegators, 1000 plugins/flowers could bloom. Then we'd really find out what people wanted.
I think I'm starting to hone in on the real question underlying all of my recent ponderings. Once upon a time, I jumped on Awasu's bandwagon because they had a semblance of extensibility, but it never felt quite right. What is and isn't worth being pluggable and extensible in an aggregator? And then how do you design the aggregator to support that?