• Camen Design Blog et al, Wednesday, January 5, 2011 12:53 PM

Once heralded as the future of digital content consumption, RSS has seemingly been overtaken by more social services like Twitter and Facebook. But, is RSS really "dead" as some tech watchers are claiming? Igniting a lively debate this week, UK-based web designer Kroc Camen said exactly that before industry peers convinced him to drop the word "dead" for "being ignored."

Analyzing the number of referrals and visits coming from RSS, some are suggesting that services like Facebook and Twitter are taking over the role of content syndication from RSS.

Under the headline, "Twitter And Facebook Really Are Killing RSS (At Least For TechCrunch Visitors)," MG Siegler pronounced: "RSS is slowly dying."

On the contrary, GigaOm's Mathew Ingram insists that RSS isn't going away, but rather adapting to consumers' changing consumption patterns. "Like plenty of other technologies, it is just becoming part of the plumbing of the real-time web," he insists. "RSS has become a crucial part of how web content gets fed from blogs and other sites into real-time services such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as aggregation apps like Flipboard."

"I'll write that post about how great RSS is right after I finish going through my feeds as I start my news shift," quipped ReadWriteWeb editor Marshall Kirkpatrick on Twitter.

Blogging godfather Dave Winer predicts that RSS as an open system can and will likely outlast popular platforms like Twitter. Once Twitter falls, "What rises to replace it will either be an open system built around RSS, or something indistinguishable from RSS."

Adds top venture capitalist Fred Wilson: "While I do agree that Twitter and Facebook have gained significantly in terms of driving traffic across the web, for technology oriented audiences, RSS is still a critically important distribution platform and is very much alive and well."

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