That reminds me; how well are developers served by technologies that bridge to RSS (that is, they read (or write) RSS and write (or read) another format/protocol)? Well, there's:

• nntp//rss (RSS to NNTP; Java)
  
• IM/RSS bridges, including JabRSS (RSS to XMPP; Python)
• mail/RSS - including rss2email (RSS to SMTP; Python)
• rssutilities (RSS to HTML; Java) - a JSP tag library for adding RSS feeds to a web-page
• Rome (RSS to/from other versions of RSS and Atom; Java) - RSSLibJ seems to be the nearest alternative in terms of features, but Rome nudges into first place in my book due to it's depth of RSS support and extensibility - Alejandro Abdelnur and  Patrick Chanezon are co-authors (alongside Elaine Chien) with blogs

So compared to the number of RSS client applications (such as the rather nice RSSOwl) or add-ins, there are actually not too many real bridge technologies, but at least API's like Rome make it easier to write them.