Always interesting to see "RSS is dead" in my RSS reader, even if it doesn't sound like you actually hold with that idea. And while Twitter and Facebook may have more traction (more interesting/memorable names, for a start), I find RSS to be more dense, more nutritious, if you like. I advocate for it where I can, as it's ubiquitous in ways the others aren't (Mail.app and Safari both support RSS, and Google Reader for the teeming millions of Gmai users as well).

I made the very first (free) RSS feed at CNN.com, back in 1999 (I think I saw something in a Mozilla article). At the time, I was managing the hosted search engines (we used Infoseek which I'm sure no one remembers) and one of it's more useful features was the notion of adding files to be indexed, through a formatted sitelist file. It wasn't difficult to repurpose that list into a feed and while very people used it (I left CNN in early 2000), it was well-received in some of the overseas operations, as it gave them a quick review of the top stories without pulling a lot of extranea over a slow link (remember, this was 1999, when a T-1 was fat pipe and people still used dialup modems). It went off the air on 9/11/2001, as a result of a machine move (there was a big news event that day and lots of stuff got moved around in the data center, from what I understand). I would have liked to see how many people were reading it up til then.

So I'm still a fan of RSS. In fact, I discovered this feed through my re-immersion in NetNewsWire last night: it came as one of the installed feeds.