Actually I dislike RSS for purely technical reasons. As a protocol, it is a huge step back compared to the functionally somewhat comparable NNTP. All it gives you is a sliding window into the content provided by a publisher you have to poll in undefined intervals. If you poll too often, you cause unnecessary traffic. If you poll too seldom, you are going to miss content. With NNTP, there was not only a push protocol, you could also easily request all new stuff since your last check. And you had a comment system built in as well.
For sure the inventors of Web 2.0 could have done better.
[edit]I am still using it, though, as there is no available alternative. Unfortunately, there are no real incentives to make something better.[/edit]
I agree with the fact that RSS is not a good protocol. But as you said unfortunately there's no alternative. I guess what really surprised me is that people consider Twitter/Facebook an alternative to RSS.
the <cloud> element solves the problem of polling, it lets you subscribe to feed-updated notifications and read the feed only when it changes.
also, Atom has threading and RSS has some community efforts underway to make "replies" decentralized and aggregable (new word) http://xmlns.inreplyto.me/
Actually I dislike RSS for purely technical reasons. As a protocol, it is a huge step back compared to the functionally somewhat comparable NNTP. All it gives you is a sliding window into the content provided by a publisher you have to poll in undefined intervals. If you poll too often, you cause unnecessary traffic. If you poll too seldom, you are going to miss content. With NNTP, there was not only a push protocol, you could also easily request all new stuff since your last check. And you had a comment system built in as well.
For sure the inventors of Web 2.0 could have done better.
[edit]I am still using it, though, as there is no available alternative. Unfortunately, there are no real incentives to make something better.[/edit]