This is where the people who only hang out with other bleeding edgers end up - so deep in the well that they can't tell how empty it really is. Steve Gillmor thinks that the "River of News" (i.e., Twitter) has won, and RSS has lost:

Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed - whatever they grew from, they morphed into a realtime CMS for the emerging media. Twitter, not RSS, became the early warning system for new content. Facebook, not RSS, became the social Rolodex for events, casual introductions to RSS’ lifeblood, the people behind the feeds. FriendFeed, not RSS, captured the commentsphere. RSS got locked out of its own party.

Reality looks a little different. Go ask a bunch of non-tech-heads whether they use RSS - you'll get lots of blank stares. Ask about Twitter - same blank stares. Even inside the tech community, only a minority of people use either RSS readers or Twitter.

Steve is like the infamous NYC voter from 1972 Manhattan, with no idea how Nixon won the election, because "no one I know voted for him". Out in the real world, there hasn't been a battle between RSS and Twitter, because most people don't know that either one of them even exists...

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