Provocative if nothing else, over at the monkey methods weblog Andrew Chen claims Technorati and Feedster are essentially dead ends as standalone concerns. The gist is neither enterprise is distinctive enough to avoid being swallowed by one of Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, or MSN. The most critical hit is that both engines have poor interfaces for actually seeing into that huge iceberg of content. If you claim to track the "news of the blogosphere" why channel people through a keyword search? In the comments, David Sifry (Technorati) and Scott Rafer (Feedster) obviously object, keying on "RSS is different" and their web services APIs.
I tend to agree with Chen. I honestly think that there are a couple of folks at each of the big boy's research labs who could, in a summer project, ride the house crawler and indexer to more interesting results on a large body of webfeeds. These side projects might not reach the scale of Feedster or Technorati, but once they internally figure a way to get something really distinctive out of webfeeds, then the mothership could swoop on the small fry just for the pre-existing database. Besides, I'll bet with Google and Yahoo engineers any day of the week. As Suw Charman pointed out, there's some nuts and bolts stuff that could use a bit of polishing.
Then again, maybe Technorati and Feedster have neato analyses internally, probably ad related, that they're keeping quiet. Besides I'm on record that Sergey and Larry should swallow Bloglines first.