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There’s been a slew of blog posts, even news articles (since when does the news write about RSS…obviously it’s been a while since I blogged), suggesting that RSS is dead. The latest was Mike Arrington of TechCrunch suggesting that because Google killed FeedBurner and Dick Costolo (former FeedBurner CEO) left Google for Twitter, that someone this meant that RSS was dead. Anecdotal evidence that people aren’t using Google Reader or Bloglines anymore seems to act as a corollary to this notion.

This is all wrong. RSS is alive and well; in fact, RSS, like Obi Wan-Kenobi after Darth Vader struck him down, has moved on, becoming a part of something greater. Certainly as a buzzword, RSS has passed it’s prime, but so have many other ubiquitous technologies such as TCP or HTML, and surely no one would argue those are dead.

Well, you’re asking…how is RSS being used today if no one is using Google Reader? Well, first off, people are. There’s also market intelligence firms using it to power business applications. And major content sites that syndicate their content both internally and externally using RSS. Not to mention the fact that Google itself utilizes RSS to keep up with new content published on millions of sites across the web.

There’s no question, however, that Twitter has had a dramatic impact on online user behavior and communication. Twitter has shown that users like to follow rather than subscribe, that the personal associations and quick and easy communication that Twitter enables is easier and more efficient that the past options; and that blogging, rather than a means of personal representation, should be viewed as online media.

The potential for RSS as an end user/consumer technology was never very bright; it’s real potential lay in providing a backbone for online communication and syndication. Suggesting that Twitter, a consumer application, has somehow killed RSS, is a classic straw man argument.

As I was writing this, Fred Wilson posted making much the same argument, and Marshall Kirkpatrick had a great post from a few weeks back explaining how RSS is a crucial component of how he keeps up with the news.