Recently, there has been a discussion on Slashdot about RSS, and about how only 4% of users knowingly use it. Most of the people involved in the discussion said things like “RSS is just a fashion these days”, or “I have no use for it - I’d rather go to any sites I’m interested in, myself”, or even “it’s just the second coming of 1998’s “push” technology, in disguise.”
The following is a translation of a comment of mine in Carlos Rodrigues’ blog, which I believe deserves a post here.
RSS is useful for much more than subscribing to news sites, or to a couple of blogs.
For instance, yes, I don’t subscribe to feeds for sites which have new stuff every day, and which I visit daily. In such cases, there would be no point - the feed would simply be a repetition of information. I just go to the site myself.
But what if it’s a site (say, a blog) where everything there interests me, but the author only posts very rarely - say, he may post 3 times in a particular week, but then only post next month. Does it make sense for me to go there daily, knowing that most of the time there won’t be anything new there? To me, that would become a chore. Nope, it makes a lot more sense to subscribe to that site’s feed. When there’s something new, I’ll know it. When there isn’t, I don’t even have to remember that the site exists. Best of both worlds.
Another case: comment feeds. I subscribe to those for all my own blogs, and, so, I know I don’t miss any comments - even for older posts, which have long left the front page. A lot of my posts are technical or other guides, which are timeless, and comments in them make sense. And if they’re spam, and somehow got through the spam filters, I can delete them. If it wasn’t for comment feeds, it would be quite easy for me never to see some comments. In fact, I think this is one of the main reasons people disable comments for older posts in their blogs, or even turn comments off altogether - an idea I strongly dislike, it seems to me much like stopping using email because there’s so much spam.
The same thing exists for wikis (a feed of recent changes, which has helped me detect some spamming attempts in my wiki, before I plugged a hole there).
Or for web forums, such as phpBB. A feed with new comments can make sure you don’t miss anything, even in a very active forum.
And there’s more. Search feeds. Instead of subscribing to a feed for some particular site or blog, you subscribe to a search for one or more words, say, using Google’s Blog Search, or using Bloglines‘ own functionality. Then you get everything new about those search terms, no matter where it was posted - news sites, blogs, whatever.
And, finally, yes, RSS feeds are the only way to keep up with more than half a dozen sites. Which, if you plan to someday be a full-time blogger, is essential. 
Related posts:
RSS feed
Well said! With all of the blogs, forums, and sites that I visit each day, it would be maddening without some way of governing them all. It is almost a “management by exception” approach. Sign me up, and I’ll deal with new information as it is injected into the blogosphere.
Cheers.
Scott
I don’t find any of those applications to be compelling reasons for using RSS. Comment feeds, for instance: I’ve got my blog’s comment feed integrated into the Google Personalized homepage. I find it takes a long time to update; 99 percent of the time, I’ll learn of new comments through routine checks of my WP Dashboard. (I used to have email notifications set up for comments, which was also instantaneous.)
Active use of RSS is never going to appeal to anybody beyond the power user set. Integrating both the generation and retrieval of feeds into larger automated applications will keep the technology around, but it’s not going to be something that the vast majority will seek out.