> But the real reason RSS loses is that it's built on XML, and because nobody actually wants to look at XML a feed is read and written solely by computers, for

> But the real reason RSS loses is that it's built on XML, and because nobody actually wants to look at XML a feed is read and written solely by computers, for whose convenience its design has been optimized Not really sure why you say that. RSS was pretty successful for a while - successful enough to get built into every browser and most email clients. End user consumers never saw the XML and the publishing side was usually built into blog software so neither did the publishers. I think this is not so much about XML but rather a more generic notion of simplicity - the whole concept of Twitter is so brain dead simple that it removes nearly all friction in adopting it. It's a much more general simplicity than just the encoding.