[nindwen]

> blogs and rss because they were so geeky and hard to use for normal people

But isn't this fixable? What about a service with a twitter-like UX, but where following people just subscribes to their announced rss-feeds. User profiles would be, at least under the hood, a list of user's own blogs (and the service would also provide twitter-like publishing) and followed rss feeds. You'd have the advantage of supporting most pre-existing blogs, but could also provide a great user friendly experience.

[zimpenfish]

You'd also get twitter-like outages as 10k people all try to fetch the RSS from $semifamous at the same time. Or you get people burning their mobile data trying to fetch 2k RSS feeds multiple times per day. Or [any one of umpteen other problems people don't consider when proposing this solution].