| Have you heard? RSS is dead. Well, its not really dead, of course, but Twitter and Facebook have gotten some folks—like Steve Gillmor and, most recently, Sam Diaz—so starry-eyed that they've declared RSS as a thing of the past.  I'll go out on a limb (not really very far out) here and predict that RSS will be with us for a long, long time. RSS is a data interchange protocol. The types of content and the types of applications using RSS will continue to evolve (as they have for a decade) but the RSS protocol will be in wide use for many years to come.
Twitter will not change this. Nor will Facebook. These (and many other) applications represent new sources of data and more opportunities for data interchange. RSS (probably with some real-time enabling enhancements such as PubSubHubbub) will continue to exist behind the scenes. I've been around this industry for a long time now. I remember people predicting the death of COBOL at the hands of "modern, structured" languages like C. Guess what? It didn't happen. There are more lines of COBOL in production now than ever before. Of course, there are lots of other things in production now, too, but COBOL is far, far from dead and gone. So shall it be with RSS. It is simply too deeply entrenched. But the need for attention grabbing headlines is also deeply entrenched. So, I expect we'll continue to see articles about the death of RSS for years to come. | 
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