RSS is one of those technologies that is amazing in its simplicity yet extremely versatile. I think of it of the Twitter of yesteryear. Nearly every blog and website exposes an RSS feed for easy consumption by RSS readers such as Google Reader and Newsgator. These tools allow you to easily see updates to several blogs, all in one place, without ever having to visit the multitudes of sites you may be subscribed to.
And therein lies the rub. A typical RSS subscription only brings in the posts of a blog, not the comments people have made on those posts. As Fred Wilson of AVC.com has said, often, the comments are just as, if not more valuable than the posts themselves. Its also difficult to join a community around a blog like Endgadget or Lifehacker when all you see are the blog posts themselves. Much of the sites' flavor and sense of community comes from the comments.
Google Reader offers the ability to comment on posts and even share thos comments with friends but those comments only live withing the Google Friend Connect universe (for now). Friendfeed tries to address this problem but can only be successful if all your commentors are using Friendfeed. Disqus.com makes it easier to follow comments on your own blog and helps you track comments that were made as replies to your own comments but still falls short when it comes to watching conversations in your favorite blogs.
What I'd love to see in RSS is "Correlated Subfeeds". Before you start Googling it, you should know that I just made up the term. It was inspired by Correlated Subqueries which derive part of their filtering clause from a parent query. In other words, allow every RSS feed to specify a subfeed that would take the unique post ID for any post in the feed, and insert into a new feed request for comments on that post.
For example: suppose I've defined a feed for this blog at http://izontech.com/rss/posts. My subfeed would be http://izontech.com/rss/comments/postid{0}. The {0} would then be replaced with the ID of each post. Readers that support this feature would be able to provide a tree view under each post that would show the comments belonging to each post. This would also make subcribing to a discussion forum much more intuitive. Instead of subscribing to a new thread feed and then to individual discussion feeds, we could just have one feed, "New Threads" and the discussions would be captured in the correlated subfeeds.
Perhaps the world has moved on from RSS and embraced newer technology. The real-time aspect of these alternatives is incredible attractive. However, RSS has been around for a long time and will continue to be for a while. Why not make it more useful?
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