Burried in Norman Walsh’s thoughts on whether AtomPub has “failed” or RSS is “dead” is a simple and oft overlooked use-case for syndication formats:

If your experience of syndication was that you lived in your favorite feed aggregator, refreshing it constantly so that you could get the latest “hot link” or one-liner from your friends the minute they happened, then sure, I can see how Twitter is a replacement.

That’s just not how I ever used syndication. I never used (my) reader more than a few times a week after the initial technology excitement wore off. I use it to collect and aggregate longer, more thoughtful pieces from users or sites that offer a good signal-to-noise ratio on the topics I’m interested in.

Emphasis mine because it is amazing how many feed readers miss on this feature.