"People who hang around with bloggers all know what RSS is (if you don't, I'll introduce it.) RSS is headed for some interesting times as regards client software, traffic management, and business model, and it would be reasonable to expect some breakage along the way.
RSS FOR THE UNINITIATED: The history of RSS is fraught and complicated and I'm not going there. To summarize, RSS is a little XML language that you use to describe changes in a web site. Usually this is called an 'RSS feed'. Then all kinds of different programs can read the RSS feed and give you clickable news summaries that mean you don't actually have to visit all those websites unless you know there's something there you want to read.
Most people, once they start using RSS to check the news, just don't go back, the amount of time and irritation saved is totally, completely addictive....
When I turn on my laptop in the morning, NetNewsWire goes out and scans 21 RSS feeds. Then it checks up on them at 30-minute intervals after that (this is configurable). I don't know how typical that is, but I know there are people who track way more than I do. There's a problem here - if RSS becomes as wildly popular as a lot of prognosticators (including me) predict, there is going to be an ungodly traffic bulge every morning, and then at half-hour intervals all day.
People who read RSS through web-based products like the Userland offering are going to present a much smaller load to the sites providing the RSS. But I think that RSS-reading is going to get wired into Mozilla and IE and Safari and people will just do it from their desktop.
Fortunately, I think the Web's caching mechanisms will hold up under the load assuming everyone plays by the rules. Unfortunately, at the moment we're not...
I hate to be a wet blanket but I just don't see RSS readers persisting for too long as a standalone application class, this stuff just belongs in the browser. It will take a couple of years for it to get cooked into mainstream browsers in a mature enough form to be usable, so the guys with the RSS-reader software should make hay while the sun shines and start figuring out their Next Big Thing.
RSS was driven by the Weblog-technology companies and I suspect they'll continue to do just fine, Weblogging ain't going away any time soon. Also, anyone who does any kind of publishing software had better start offering a real-easy-to-use RSS interface and sooner rather than later or they're just not going to be in the game." [Textuality, via WebReference]
Emphasis above is totally mine. I'm up to something like 175 feeds in my aggregator, and it scans once an hour.
I can't say "me, too" loudly or often enough. I'm a big believer in RSS (in fact, I've based our entire grant project on it), and I agree that RSS readers will go mainstream and become background like browsers. In fact at this rate, I think RSS will make great headway with PDA and cell phone browsers first. I think there's a huge future for multimedia enclosures in RSS. My plan is to revolutionize communication between Illinois Library Systems using RSS.
