Patrick Logan made some comments on the whole RSS/Echo situation that really resonated with me.

What's the best thing about aggregators? The fact they mainly visit weblogs? No. The fact they use RSS? No.

The best thing about aggregators is that they are better user interfaces for browsing the web than Mosaic, which is really what we're still using when we use IE.

Well at least Mozilla and Safari have tabs, for crying out loud.

What do we need, another Echo? Nope. We really need better applications. What happened to that Web Services revolution anyway, that the heat generated in 2003 is about HTTP.

Aggregators are such a better user interface that the aggregator has replaced the web browser as my UI to the web. Except for the fact that the aggregator that I'm using, Aggie, outputs a huge HTML page, due to my style of processing the aggregator output. You can't ignore the fact that the improved UI of the aggregator is due to a common data format, in this case RSS. I think that it may not be possible to improve the applications without improving the data format. The parts of Echo that are most valuable to me are the archiving use case and an improved/enriched editing/posting API. Tightening up the meaning of parts of certain parts of the spec would be valuable as well.