- it solved a problem that 99.999% of the online public either doesn’t have, doesn’t know they have, or doesn’t care that they have. - a lot of energy was pour

- it solved a problem that 99.999% of the online public either doesn’t have, doesn’t know they have, or doesn’t care that they have. - a lot of energy was poured into the absolutely stupid who gets credit for what, who did what to whom, who linked what where, who’s the real napster wars of 2002-2005. - RSS and Atom are frozen relics of the post web 1.0 pre web 2.0 era. Support for anything other than html or text is a grab bag of works in this reader, doesn't work in that reader, is silently and completely removed by this other reader. - it's in no one's best interests (financially, spiritually, professionally) for RSS to “succeed”. It had many fathers, all of whom moved on to other things, even 410'ing their online selves. - it's difficult to monetize RSS. Ads may or may not work, you have to resort to gimmicks and most savvy users (who are likely a majority of the people reading your feed in the first place) are blocking ads, so there. - it's difficult to prove the value of RSS to the publisher: how many people read this item? Dunno. You can't trust the number of unique user agents pulling the feed, because more likely than not they're mostly spam bots looking for content to republish. You could choose to trust the feedburner statistics, if you're using FB. - RSS feeds can't be styled in any useable, uniform way. To many people this is a benefit of RSS, but it means that inline images that work great in the original article end up out of context. Any attempt to use CSS styling to set off differences in an article are mostly lost. There are some work arounds but mostly manual hacks. The public has moved on. It sucks. RSS feeds will continue to be available for years, if not decades because they’re built into the publishing plumbing of many systems. There were gopher servers running well into the late 1990s in various places, much to the surprise at times of security administrators. When faced with a public user base that goes to google.com and then types in the web site they want in the search box, we responded with RSS/Atom. It is a much better way of reviewing and consuming a lot of information, but the user experience sucks, and it’s in no one’s interests to fix that. Find a way to profit, stunningly, from RSS and it’ll take off again. Continue to confine it to the techno–geek ghetto and that’s where it will remain. [edit:formatting]