"The web" has a specific meaning, and IRC and Usenet are not generally considered part of it.
RSS is -- the essential concept was even included in the initial vision for the web:
>With help from Robert Cailliau, [Berners-Lee] published a more formal proposal (on 12 November 1990) to build a "Hypertext project" called "WorldWideWeb" (one word, also "W3") as a "web" of "hypertext documents" to be viewed by "browsers" using a client–server architecture.[4] This proposal estimated that a read-only web would be developed within three months and that it would take six months to achieve "the creation of new links and new material by readers, [so that] authorship becomes universal" as well as "the automatic notification of a reader when new material of interest to him/her has become available."
RSS doesn't have to be a "content" it can be used as metainformation. Here's the obvious UI experience:
You've got lots of bookmarks. Much as browsers recently started downloading and displaying "favicons" (well, maybe not so recently, I'm an old timer), there is no reason a browser can't download the RSS feed from a site and compare the date of the most recent update to the latest date in the browsers history log. In other words if there's something new, its "bold" in my bookmarks and if not, its regular.
Now this is opt-in spamable, if you're running a journalist site or ecommerce, of course you doctor your sites feed to always appear new in someone's bookmarks even if its the same old recycled garbage. But there's more to the 'net than online stores and tabloid journalism.
Another novel user experience would be the trend of turning the "address/URL bar" into a search gateway bar. I think it fairly logical that if I use the "search" bar it should search and prioritize results from RSS feeds I subscribe to, below my own bookmarks and above generic web search results (aka google)
I don't think RSS is very interesting as "content" or an "app" but it could be pretty useful as metainformation.
Man, is it annoying when writers don't know the difference between the internet and the web. Maybe we could have a little test on the account-creation page?
