Kroc Camen has a post about the impending death of RSS.
Having been a strong advocate of RSS (and also ATOM) for years (see MessageCast), I tend to read posts/rants about the soon-to-be-dead data format with some suspicion. Some posts are pure link bait (who could forget this?) While some are much more reasoned.
Kroc Carmen’s post falls into the latter category – he obviously values RSS and in his view, the lack of adoption (Mozilla claims a measly 3 - 7% utilization of the RSS “subscribe” features and is removing them from Firefox 4.0) is due simply to poor Web UI
The browser RSS button is the worst piece of UI since 2004.
I hadn’t stopped to consider this. After Firefox and IE added RSS support 5+ years ago things seemed to moving in the right direction. However, it was obvious that RSS is a geek-type thing that was never going to be adopted by the masses. Most people just don’t get what structured data feeds are all about (and of course, calling RSS “structured” is being kind)
Asa Dotzler (who btw follows 0 folks on Twitter??) has some great points in the post as well, check it out.