On stage now at Gnomedex are Scott Rafer (Feedster), Mark Fletcher (Bloglines), Bob Wyman (Pub Sub) (left to right in the photo) talking about how they think RSS will evolve. Wyman is surprised that RSS hasn't evolved much in the last year, and thinks only large economics -- like the take off of RSS on mobile phones - will change the format now. Fletcher agrees that there haven't been many innovations in extensions, but he's not really worried about that. He sees RSS as a universal inbox, keeping track of only what you haven't read yet. He's looking forward to RSS continuing to keep track of all sorts of data and creep into more areas like flight notifications, package tracking.
Advice from this group is that publishers should publish in just one format, rather than publish the same content in multiple formats. They say this works fine because the aggregators can now read all the formats, and publishing multiple formats just confuses viewers.

Wyman predicts that the future of RSS is not RSS, but rather Atom. He says Atom is more flexible and offers more variety in what it allows you to do -- like signatures and support for Internationalization. He says we've learned lots about user demand in the Atom specification process. But this format debate is just a techie thing. There are more interesting issues around RSS to talk about.

Great question from the audience -- These companies started in around 2003. What would you do differently if you were to start your company again? Fletcher says he would change the name from Bloglines because it proven to be confusing. Wyman says he would have started Pub Sub 6-8 months earlier. Rafer says he would have done nothing different.