I think I have been following RSS almost from day 1 (almost). I have been using a feed aggregator almost since Dave Winner – the “inventor” – and his company Radio Userland started to evangelize feeds and more specifically RSS feed (as oppose to Atom format which is a bit more complicated to deploy but expose more feature).

I have always wondered how this invention will actually propagate in the masses. The RSS icon is not so user friendly and still does not talk much to my mom, adding a feed to an aggregator is not so obvious, real feed aggregator (like Google’s reader) remains very geeky… somehow with Netvibes, My Yahoo and alike we reach a state where it can be use by slightly bigger population than just the nerds but in my opinion it is still not very satisfying. That’s where Twitter becomes REALLY powerful. From a "share my status and what I am doing" tool they reach the state of being the aggregator of the masses. Everyone shares its links on his/her Twitter channel. Thanks to the API, big medias publish links to their online content as soon as it’s published, blog plateform let you use plugin that will publish any update from your blog on your Twitter channel, not to mention all other tools build up on top of the API that lets you share picture, video, status, and links… ie. Twitter has become the aggregator for the masses.

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