As for Feedburner, that of course does turn RSS from a standard to a service. If Google stopped supporting it, quite a few bloggers, including me, would be in bother. I seriously regret ever starting to use it, to be honest, though the stats are nice (when I bother to check them).

In Firefox, when I view an RSS feed, it tries to display it in a relatively friendly way – and gives me a link to subscribe with a range of RSS subscription tools. In Chrome, I get a lot of code and no idea of how to ‘action’ this feed or subscribe to it. For the end user that’s a big difference…

Of course, the publisher or RSS does have an option to bring their feeds back to life. If the feed happened to be running through Feedburner – then, hey-presto – even if my browser doesn’t support it I get a friendly interstitial page that makes RSS really simple for me. Or if instead of/as well as a direct link to the feed, I can find links to an explanation of how to subscribe to the feeds, their usability is at least on life-support.

Perhaps testing how users experience RSS with their current browsers – and thinking about how changing browser functionality might require a change in site design / RSS implementation to keep it flowing is what’s needed?

RSS is an easy and standardised way of moving data between applications. Some of those applications are feed reader apps used by end users, like Google Reader. But many of them are not. RSS is plumbing. If you don’t want to attach your mouth to the end of a pipe, fine. There are plenty of other uses, like the criminally-underused RSS to email and my very own Barcode Posters.