RSS isn't dead it just needs to be repurposed.
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Think about the way RSS feeds are handled by browsersfor a second, because that's the most likely place a user is going to encounter RSS feeds anyway ...
Google Chrome sends you to Google reader or another RSS reader of your choice ... if you've never messed with RSS, you're going to tap out immediately (what the heck is an RSS reader?), Firefox adds it to your bookmarks, and you can't even tell when new items have arrived etc, The RSS feeds in IE are an absolute joke ... only Opera even gets this remotely right.
Even on Feed Demon which is by far the best RSS reader on the market, the way it is initially set up, makes consuming content rather awkward unless you know exactly what you're doing. The View Port is half or a quarter the normal size of a browser window (until you adjust the reader orientation in the options), and you're forced to click twice to read content since the actual article isn't usually shown in the window ... Unless you're a determined user, you're not going to care very much for all the hoops you have to jump through to actually read content in an RSS reader ... when you can just keep using a browser.
That is the problem.
Google reader is nice, but why should I go to a web page to read content that I could be reading in a browser anyway?
If someone sits down and makes a kick ass RSS reader (feed demon with smart defaults is pretty much there already), and sells the fact that you can now read, tag, annotate and bookmark your content as easily as you would with email ... and like email ... have the ability to get access to all these bookmarks, notes, read/unread articles regardless of what machine they were on ... I think RSS would get a lot more traction.
So, lets focus less on the technology (how many email readers really care if they're using IMAP or POP, for example) and just get users a new, smarter way of consuming content.
I bet there's some money in it even ;)
Second, there are a slew of native clients for Google Reader, all of which synch up with it. Meaning, you can read your feeds on your smartphone, your iPad, your computer, your computer at your work, someone else's computer and everything is just synched. This works great for me, and there are some great native clients for Google Reader out there.
Third, I don't understand the problem of having too many feeds. It's just a matter of removing the ones you don't want to read much, or categorize them into things that you must read, and things for when you are just bored.
I think RSS reading is a tool for pros. It's not for those who just visit a handful of websites every day, it's for those who are interested in many many more, and who want to automate the task of finding out what websites have been updated; not an everyman a tool, it's one for advanced users. It doesn't matter how simple RSS useage is made, if you don't find the job of checking your sites for updates tedious and laborious you're not going to need an RSS reader.
I agree with most of your post, but I think this is somewhat off. It's less to do with pro/casual than the style of content consumption. Say Mrs Housewife usually just browses the front page of Yahoo. She doesn't need an RSS feed for that; she's fine with missing items. In fact, keeping up with all the content would probably be tiring.
But then her friend Mrs Awesomecook starts a great blog sharing her recipes. Mrs Housewife wants to try each one, but Mrs Awesomecook only seems to update once or twice every week.
This is when you want RSS. She wants to see every single item, but checking the site can become a chore. It's annoying to check this and her other friends' blogs when there's nothing new, but she also wants to see all of the new stuff and in a timely manner. By subscribing to an RSS feed, she can make this easier.
I think part of the problem is that Mrs Housewife has no idea what an RSS feed or reader is, much less what it's useful for. Furthermore, to learn a new technology like that, she'd have to see a benefit worth taking the trouble for, which usually has to be pretty high for non-technical users.
Edit: And apologies if my examples seem prejudiced/sexist, it was just the first thing that came to mind since it's somewhat similar to why I taught my mom to use Google Reader (which she now loves).
On to less productive comments...
RSS may not be dead, but punctuation apparently is. I thought there was a typo in the post on HN, but it turns out that this little run-on headline is in the actual post. The rest of the post is even worse grammatically.
Hey guys, if you're going to write on your company's blog, invest in a bit of proofreading. Bad posts reflect negatively on not only you, but your startup also.
They could use a few semicolons in place of some of those periods, though; especially where it starts to get period-heavy near the end.
P.s. looks like you could have put your point in a tweet :)
My assumption is debatable for sure, but I'd like to hear what folks think is lacking.
Twitter works for many more people because there is One Place for those data streams. CNN, Comcast, Oprah they're all at and on "Twitter". If you want to subscribe to a Twitter stream there's a clear and unambiguous way to 'hook in' and the data stream is of a consistent form.
RSS, on the other hand, involves hunting about pages looking for feed streams that may not exist, possibly installing plugins to simplify the process of adding those streams (once found), getting a reader, having no idea what type of information you'll be getting back [1], nor the form of the posts [2], nor having any consistent method of feed interaction [3] and no easy way to delegate your list of sources to one or many friends who will then curate the source news for you.
Basically, RSS allows specific readers to suck, it allows specific feeds to suck and it allows the whole experience to suck. Twitter isn't the best, but the whole thing is easy-to-use, consistent and dependable. Similarly with the 'like' functionality of Facebook.
[1] filtered list of content? way more than you wanted? old? buggy and re-spamming you with old stories? buggy skipping stories?
[2] full content? abbreviation? uselessly-short abbreviation? sane links for sharing? short links? ads? obtrusive ads? poor formatting?
[3] Do I click the RSS headline to see the full post? The link the post referred to? Some lame on-site redisplay of what was already in my reader, because I was expected to click some image button in the summary?
I can paste any website's URL to Google Reader to subscribe to that site's RSS feed.
What kind of a standard way is there to find out the Twitter feed of a random website or blog I happen to run across and want to follow? Do I search for the author's name on Twitter? Can I be sure I get all the posts and not some other crap he's tweeting?
The primary use for Twitter is to find feeds directly on Twitter. Either by searching or by seeing who your friends follow. Which is what most people do. They sort through what their friends follow and pick and choose from that. Adding a few additional feeds here and there, but those being the minority.
That's what Google Reader's social widgets were trying to replicate. That's what Buzz was trying to replicate. Discovering feeds from friends. Because most users don't discover new sources for themselves.
I'm completely baffled by comments like this. I've tried subscribing to feeds that have just headlines or headline and one sentence and I end up never reading them. Almost all the feeds I read have full text and the rest have at least 100 words of the content per post, not 140 characters, so I can tell if it's worth clicking on.
Sites like reddit (or HN) which have voting and a decent commenting system add value, but Twitter? I'm actually turned off when I read some thoughtful blog post somewhere and at the end it says "if you liked this, follow me on Twitter." Yeah, thanks, but no, I must have mistaken you for someone who could form complete sentences.
It's okay for consuming newspaper articles that don't support comments, but frustrating for blogs where you want to be part of the conversation.
Until publishers can figure out how to write for medium length content, it will be tucked away for use by self professed nerds who like to access and manipulate information quickly.