But hold your horses; do you know what the most requested feature for Flipboard is? Integration with Google Reader and the ability to include RSS-feeds is in high demand as well! And while we’re at it, Google Reader seems not to be doing too bad either, according to their own stats, probably because Reader -as opposed to Bloglines- continuous to evolve, integrating a slew of social features. Reader is also the primary source for Feedly, a popular browser add-on that offers a magazine-like view on subscribed feeds. And proving RSS is not dead yet, Automattic last week launched Subscriptions on wordpress.com, which displays your subscribed feeds in a stream-like fashion, including the writer’s profile picture and a ‘reblog’ and ‘like’ button (i.e. resembling what Peter Van Dijck proposed earlier that day).
Even if RSS-readers would ever become marginalized, RSS and similar standardized XML-based newsfeeds (think Atom) are indispensable to syndicate content from one site in another application. After all, how do you think news outlets and blogs feed their content into Twitter and Facebook in the first place?