The tools aspect is, I think, the key. Mainstream audiences don’t want tools that require too much configuration or customization or thought. They want their info and they want to get things done and they want things to just work. So I think the key to mainstream adoption of RSS is to make it disappear, and in a lot of ways it already has – Facebook’s mini feed of friends’ activities, for example. I doubt many people login, see that, and think, “Hey, RSS at work!”

If we can provide ways for people to reap the benefits of information management within the sites and applications they already use (or will come to use), I think there’s a lot of opportunity. But for those of us who deal with the back end of the web as well as the front end, it’s hard to wrap the brain around being that far removed from the source of our info and activities.

I love tinkering too, so we just move forward bit-by-bit.

I just wonder about RSS — does it really seem like it is starting to break into the mainstream? Even as a developer it took me some time to wrap my head around the tools and the workflow of using RSS, so I am just not sure I see it as the future for most web users. Perhaps you are creating great tools that really enable this though. I haven’t taken a look at what exactly you are doing.