I certainly hope that RSS is not dead.
RSS consumption via newsreaders may be on the decline (although I find the implementation in Apple Mail quite usable), but I can assure you, RSS is actually the life blood of the new social web.
For the vast vast majority of content, RSS is the API. It isn’t perfect but trying to learn a new set of calls for every content site on the Web would be a nightmare for the clever developers who try to stitch it all back together.
RSS reading has always been a techie behavior and we are finally starting to see the maturity of feed based content consumption as it jumps to mainstream inside of other applications. In fact, while working on 30 Boxes back in 2005 we thought of ourselves as making RSS content available to the consumer in a new and more approachable way.
In the last few years we have seen both Facebook and their new toy FriendFeed make heavy use of RSS as a facile way of generating news feeds of open web content. Even twitter has enormous chunks of content that are translations of RSS being done via the twitterfeed app.
We need RSS and more standardized pieces of content formatting that are widely adopted and globally available.
Long live RSS!
No Soap, Radio! 