Don pointed out that Chris is working on a news aggregator called Harvester. Looks really cool.
Perhaps the coolest thing about Harvester, however, is that the teaser image features my blog! Is someone actually reading this thing? :)
That being said, as slick as it looks, I still don't know if it would ever be useful to me. I've tried a few aggregators in the past, but I've never really caught on and used it for any extended period of time.
I was thinking about this recently, and it became more apparent when I considered my reading habits. I spend a lot of time at work, and I like to check out various weblogs when I have some down time throughout the day. Perhaps there's something interesting or relevant to the work I'm doing, but at the very least it's a nice break from the routine of the day. This is usually just a quick browse though, and I'm not usually able to spend an extended period of time reading a long post, so I often will want to go back and read things more thoroughly when I get home. Problem is, once I get home, I end up wasting valuable time sifting through things that I had already read.
Also - I can't install software (easily) at work, and even running a SmartClient over HTTP is likely not going to go over well (despite the fact that it's sandboxed, it'll probably raise some flags).
So, for an aggregator to be really useful to me, it needs to de-couple the aggregation/datastore from the presentation. When I'm at work (or not at my home computer in general), I want to be able to get at the data via a web browser. When I'm at home, I want a nice, powerful UI like Harvester or Syndirella or NewsGator. When I'm travelling or on the train or whatever, I want to be able to read on my PocketPC. And, most importantly, I want all of these to use the same data set. When I've already read something at work, I want to know that when I get home, and vice versa.
Maybe I'll end up rolling my own someday.... :)