So people have been calling for widespread abandonment of RSS, a simple, dominant update publishing technology developed as a way of syndicating content between web sites, servers, and browsers.  Some reputable people have even gone so far as to call RSS a web “1.0″ technology, which is a masked form of irrational exuberance over the phenomenon known as Twitter.

Mike Arrogantington has comented that RSS is “definitely dead” because Feedburner’s CEO is going to Twitter.  Perhaps this has less to do with the health of RSS and more to do with the fact that Feedburner just isn’t fashionable any more, while Twitter is considered sexy and curvy.  Sam Diaz, too, is going to get a nice paycheck.  Hey, if Twitter was throwing money at me, I’d probably say RSS was dead, too.

Yet Twitter’s greatest promise remains not as the solution for those seeking a chat application, a social networking tool, an authentication scheme, and certainly not as a content syndication standard, but rather as a platform for accomplishing all of the above.  My point is this:  RSS is for more than just update pinging (which is basically ALL Twitter brings to the table for a content publisher).

RSS also accomplishes the following:

1. RSS generally enforces accurate datelines. (Twitter is subject to whenever the tweet occured.)
2. RSS offers a basis in XML, making it an extensible transport for specialized content payloads. (Twitter relies on third-party interop for such, like Twitpic, say.)
3. RSS offers a more than 140 character limit per post.  (Twitter — well, this one should be self-explanatory.)
4. RSS has no features which increase the need for spam control techniques.  (Twitter — spend your days blocking followers who want to lead you back to porn sites and borrow your credit card number.)
5. With RSS, real syndication with content duplication is possible and there are many situations where this is necessary and beneficial. (With Twitter, you’re always parsing a linkback in order to find and syndicate content.)
6. RSS is an open, community-based standard that solves a well-defined problem. (Twitter is a private concern with no apparent motive other than audience building.)
7. RSS can be used on any server in the world capable of answering a get request. (Twitter only runs on Twitter’s servers.)
8. RSS doesn’t intrinsically encourage the posting of the silly, arbitrary, private details of one’s life; ie. it’s a publishing platform. (Twitter is a social platform.)
9. RSS is entirely anonymous. (Twitter client requests are identity-based.)
10. RSS is compatible with any authentication scheme the publisher desires.  (Twitter only authenticates Twitter users.)