The Internet has been a more exciting place in the last year or two, and I think we can largely credit that to RSS, podcasting and the stupid journalist-named "mash-up" phenomenon. The idea of the Web becoming more of an application platform has become very common place.
But this is not a perfect arrangement. Those of us that run Web sites, especially those that address a niche community, need people to visit our sites and interact. RSS is a great tool for pushing out information, but it has two significant flaws.
The first flaw is that it's a single-direction medium. RSS talks at you. Because RSS was not intended to listen, it's not some great means of communication, which involves two sides to a conversation.
There are hackish ways to make RSS work as more of a two-way medium, but they aren't very good and don't look much like RSS. Let's face it, we solved these problems on Web sites ages ago, the issues of security, authentication, identity and rich functionality.
The other issue is that it's not well-suited to advertising. I realize that all of the free love feelings about sharing content and such gives people the warm fuzzies, but I need to monetize my content. It's not just about wanting to be paid, but also about wanting to pay for all of that bandwidth, more and more of which is being consumed by RSS readers that don't respect TTL (time to live) values. That's why I don't syndicate full text from this site.
Looking at it from the user side, and I admit I may not be representative of any kind of majority, I miss a ton without going to the site that is hosting the content. I need to go there to get the comments, to Digg the content if I find it interesting, often to see pictures, to see cross-referenced data, etc. For me, RSS serves as little more than a notification that there is new content. If you agree that's the primary reason for it to exist, great, but don't be one of those people who claim it will cure cancer.
This makes you wonder if it's time for a new standard that involves a bi-directional scheme. Really we already have this in a general sense in the form of Web services. I have all kinds of experience building stuff that allows two different machines to talk and exchange data, but we probably need a defined and simple standard that everyone agrees on. That's no easy task. And if you think that the mechanical spamming of blogs and forums was bad now, imagine how it would be in a purely XML world without some checks in place.
I'm not sure what the future holds, but RSS has very much reached the limits of its usefulness.