I appreciate your balanced perspective on this question.

My strong preference is for full text feeds. There are three key reasons:

1. Summary feeds are often so poorly written that they don’t effectively convey the value of the item.

2. I’m a skimmer. When online and connected, I find it very easy to use the scroll wheel (do they have those
on the Mac?) to move past the content I don’t want to read.

3. Another mobile scenario – I’m often on my notebook but not connected. If I want to use dead time (like on a bus)
to catch up with my feed reading then summary feeds are just plain anoying as I can’t get to the good stuff
until I get a connection again.

My 2 cents.

(1) Atom feeds can deliver both summary *and* content. And RSS 2.0 can incorporate the atom:summary element along side a full-text rss:description. So either/or arguments aren’t strictly necessary.

(2) On a mobile device, app switching isn’t really the issue… after all, I just use the mobile edition of Bloglines to read feeds on my Treo, which lives in the device’s browser. In a mobility context, the real problem is the interface and unnecessary button presses. Full content minimizes random clicking around, saves me from re-rendering pages, and insulates me from the frequently mobile-hostile HTML on many sites.

(3) Summary-only feeds are worse than “a bit less satisfying” in many situations. In an aggregator like Newzcrawler, Feeddemon, or RSS Bandit, non-content feeds actively slow down an “ultra-fast skimmer”.

(4) Sites that publish summary-only feeds *drastically* hamper their searchability on PubSub, Feedster, and so on.

(5) People who are serious about keeping up with blogs use tools like Newzcrawler or RSS Bandit, which can incorporate comments directly into the flow of feed content. On the desktop, I wouldn’t even consider using an aggregator that didn’t have integrated support for wfw:commentRss, and I routinely nudge bloggers who can produce the necessary comment feeds and don’t. For example, if Amy would add wfw:commentRss to her feed, a single click in my reader would allow me to keep up with this conversation. Hint, hint.

Now, with all of that said, there are people for whom actual syndication is anathema, who fear their content being “ripped off”. (Never mind that I was having my content stolen and republished before RSS even existed.) In those specific cases, I concur, summary-only is the way to go. It’s a matter of personal responsibility and self-protection at that point.