Conor McClure, on his personal blog:
What is an RSS feed? I thought you’d never ask. No, really; the non-geek community is seriously missing out by not taking advantage of RSS in this online-media-dominated world we live in.
I agree. And sometimes, on Twitter, I pretend to know the way out. Sometimes I think that so long as we rename RSS subscriptions to things like follow or subscribe and leave the tech details out of it that more and more people will use RSS. But I don’t really know if that will help.
Flipboard, Facebook Paper, and other massively popular applications use RSS behind-the-scenes to allow their users to “subscribe” to content. So, are non-nerds using RSS then? Some would argue no.
RSS has served us remarkably well and I don’t think it is going to go anywhere. But, whether or not it becomes something mainstream — with a different name or not — remains to be seen.