For some feeds (or categories of feeds), i’d rather have it NOT notify me when there’s new content. Such as humor or gadget news. It’s not urgent, and I don’t want to be bothered. However, other feed categories, such as hot deals, need to be acted on immediately, and should notify me and perhaps be tuned to a more frequent RSS check. If there are server bandwidth concerns, maybe these can operate like stock ticker services, where an extremely high refresh rate or instant access can be for paid users, whereas free users get a 15 minute delay. The feed-level alert and timing issues are present in sharpreader, as i’ve just discovered.
It would be great if this could reflect in the interface more nicely. I’ll do some more thinking about what i’d want to see and write more.
Then, for feed groupings that mostly don’t have original content, it should perform meme-tracking and aggregation among those light blogs or link blogs. Memes tend to go crazy if you’re tracking multiple link blogs.
RSS readers need to mature beyond the “I am an email client interface that is subscribed to a bunch of feeds” stage. There’s a lot of room for NLP and yet-unborn social computing techniques that can make things smarter on the backend so the frontend can be more simplified. Automatic meme aggregation, as you mentioned, is an easy win. Adaptive importance-ranking, new-feed-recommendation discovery, auto-clustering and categorization also come to mind. I can’t see what now+5years has to bring… if only I had enough free time to help bring it about…