[fluxon]

I like RSS, and my usage has gradually expanded over the years. But I can see several reasons for slowed uptake: I haven't seen new coverage of RSS such as "It's fun and easy to use RSS to collect your favorite blogs and episodic media in one place" articles for years, so it's likely very much out of the non-technical public's eye. It has become a set-and-forget commodity for media consumers who do know about it (but who don't proselytize). Getting started requires a bit of tedium - finding a decent client, copy/pasting URLs, or getting a browser to properly fire up that client to subscribe. Even finding the RSS icon/link on many content websites has become annoyingly difficult. And no blogs, podcasts or vlogs even mention "Subscribe to our RSS feed" anymore, only facebook, twitter, and maybe their website URL.

(Though I see its value for text, Google Reader (web) is weak for non-text media: it's off the main Google menubar, has no auto download, and so acts merely as a hidden, online-only index to updated content. I highly value downloading for reading/playback offline (or frequent 0-bars situations).)

A chunk of RSS's potential userbase just gravitates to what they use every day: Twitter, since "feeds" work much the same, with the addition of comments and a promotion mechanism (retweet or not).

Just thinking aloud.