That’s what I’m starting to think about RSS too… maybe it will never interest normal people.

I also love the idea that suggest to ask women instead of men about a techno idea/product. The percentage of women “really” interested in technologies is pretty low, thus they will rarely like something just because it’s “cool” or “well thought out”. If the thing doesn’t bring them any advantage, they won’t show any interest to it.

Men on the other hand (and more precisely men with geek tendencies) will think that a techo product is incredibly cool but won’t necessarely find it useful. That’s precisely how I reacted about a product called Diigo. “Wow… really cool! That’s such a great idea and it works so well!” But in the end, it wasn’t useful to me at all.

The main argument he has against RSS being adopted by the masses seems to be that only geeks are using it now. This is true. But only geeks used computers 20 years ago, now everyone has one. Only geeks were on the Internet 10-15 years ago, now everyone has access. As these things became easier to use and had better interfaces, they started being adopted by the masses.

Despite his contention that RSS is 10 years old, I think we’re still in its infancy. I remember seeing Slashdot’s RDF feed many moons ago, thinking if I had a website I could use it to show headlines from that site. The idea of reading blog posts via RSS didn’t gain widespread attention until the number of blogs with feeds exploded.

I think it’ll be a while, but eventually in a few years RSS and other XML technologies are going to find uses that will appeal to the masses. There are already feed-like services (like Facebook’s news feed) that are immensely popular. Why wouldn’t RSS have a similar future?

RSS’s future (or Atom’s future, I don’t play favourites) is ahead of it, not behind. We just have to wait for that killer app that brings it mainstream.