In a post on November 17, 2008, I created the Death Watch list, a rundown of various media whose death has been widely predicted. This is the second in a series of posts that takes a deeper dive into these.

A meme suggesting that Twitter is poised to replace RSS has been swirling through the social media space, but I largely ignored it as preposterous until Steve Gillmor reiterated and expanded on the suggestion in TechCrunch IT post. Gillmor, a contributing editor to ZDNet and host of “The Gillmor Gang” podcast, offers perspectives that bely a remarkable depth of insight into social computing, making his observations worthy of attention.

On this one, though, Steve and all those who came before him claiming Twitter has rendered RSS obsolete, just have it wrong.

Gillmor’s argument boils down to the fact that, as he puts it:

Twitter, not RSS, became the early warning system for new content. Facebook, not RSS, became the social Rolodex for events, casual introductions to RSS??? lifeblood, the people behind the feeds. FriendFeed, not RSS, captured the commentsphere. RSS got locked out of its own party.

The basic premise—that other social media channels are better at some of the uses to which RSS has been put—isn’t wrong. But it ignores the fact that RSS is still used for much, much more.

RSS has never gotten the respect it deserves. Always considered too geeky for widespread adoption, RSS appeared to be getting a boost when it was built into all the major browsers (except Google’s Chrome, a massive oversight on Google’s part) with Microsoft going so far as to scrap the “RSS” moniker in favor of the simpler-to-understand “web feeds.”

But the full power of RSS has never been genuinely appreciated. Dave Winer, who developed RSS into its current state, laments in a comment to Gillmor’s post:

It would be interesting if one of the industry conferences invited me to speak about RSS someday. It???s never happened. This is the 10th year of RSS (and) we???ve learned a lot. I would love to share some of it, but this industry has never wanted to hear what I have to say. Or so it seems.

Indeed. It has often struck me that the slow adoption of RSS is as much a lack of enthusiasm by those who do grasp its technical nature as confusion by those who don’t. My feed of Google News items on RSS hasn’t contained any worthwhile nuggests in well over a year. But, as Winer notes in his comment, RSS has become part of the Web’s infrastructure. Whether somebody is adding a portlet to iGoogle or Netvibes or viewing the latest news in a widget someone has embedded on their blog, RSS is at the core of this functionality.

But wait. There’s more. A staggering number of customized feeds have been created with Yahoo Pipes, a simple-to-use tool that lets you mash up feeds. Dozens of feeds have been created in Pipes just to simplify access to Boxee video offerings.

But Gillmor’s argument fails mostly around the notion that a river of news updates is the only reason for using RSS. First, while the news updates I get from those I follow on Twitter are often interesting, but (a) I don’t see all of them and (b) they simply cannot include everything in which I actually have an interest.

My core use of RSS is to stay current on topics about which I need to be conversant. I need to see all of the recent posts to blogs like Danny Sullivan’s SearchEngineLand and Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategy blog, among hundreds of others. I can’t rely on the tweets that fly by covering everything I need to know. For instance, I want to know about every new post by the PR and communication bloggers I follow. I’ll determine whether to read them or not based on my own judgment. I’m not willing to leave it to those I’m following to alert me to all of those new posts because, well, they won’t.

I also use RSS to set up listening posts so I can be aware the appearance of important content that has something to do with one of my clients. I sure as hell can’t count on tweets providing that kind of intelligence.

Besides, you have to figure the folks at Twitter knew what they were doing when they included an RSS subscription functionality for every Twitter account (so you can catch the tweets you would have otherwise missed from any given individual), as well as the results of a Twitter search.

Gillmor concedes (it’s hard not to) that RSS still exists, “casually subsumed as the transport for 140+ content into the social stream. There, RSS items are fed into aggregators and husked for their behavioral signals, packaged as Tweets and sold for pennies on the whuffie dollar.”

But, as Christopher S. Penn has noted more than once on the “Marketing Over Coffee” podcast, Twitter can be a dangerous play if you decide it’s the basket for all your eggs. After all, like Facebook, it’s a closed system and privately owned. Should it run out of money or be shuttered for some other reason, it’s gone—along with your followers and all the networks they represent.

RSS, on the other hand, is dependent upon no single entity. Like HTTP, it’s an open standard that can thrive regardless of the roadblocks that could be thrown in its path.

It’s my fervent hope that, rather than accept the “RSS is dead” meme as fact, the industry recognizes its long-term value and starts listening to Winer and other RSS experts who can help us tap into his full value. Whether the industry goes down that path or not, however, RSS is far from dead. It’s just becoming part of the plumbing.