Why I think RSS sucks!

Alright, RSS had great uses in the past when the bandwidth and the whole Internet was moving at a crippling pace. Today, it's the location where most power users stuff their face. Getting all the stuff they want, and giving nothing back to the site.

Yes, it's fantastic if you were pulling some news from a certain site, and it does wonders to the amount of signal vs ratio. It is GREAT for the user, not so great for the site owner

Many sites, live on the generous clicks of people. Their very existence would be challenged the minute you strip them out of their casing, crack them open and extract their content. And only, their content.

It's not like you're going to give them anything back. Their content is acquired, there is no reason to even visit these sites anymore, let alone promote them like aggregators do. At the end, the site owner loses, because of all of this content snatching

Then, there's the whole story about the amount of effort people put in the beautification of their sites. They match the best of colors, they add all sort of web2.0 gadgets that the RSS feed will not display, because it has the ugly old text only content of the site.

For all these reasons and more, I think RSS Feeds need to evolve to something better. Where the essence of the site is captured through the RSS feed, the advertising is not lost  and the site owner actually received a positive hit on their "ticker" because, they have indeed got that!

I still think RSS feeds are fantastic, and they open-up fantastic scenarios, but relying on a "READER" only inhibits all of this and leads to huge amount of frustration for the site owners. For these readers are still trailing behind 1994 technology when it comes to the content display and management.

Therefore, IMHO, RSS as we now it, is doomed, it will not be long before it's replaced with two different technologies

1) Site-to-site transfer protocol, where streams are delivered as the RSS Feeds are today. No enhancements other than possibly security and encryption

2) Site-to-user transfer protocol, where instead of Really Simple Syndication, it becomes Rich Simple Syndication! A rich content delivery mechanism capable of reducing the bandwidth, but at the same time delivering rich content that captures the site's essence and delivers other content that will be essential to the survival of the site. Without compromising simplicity and ease of use. Where security and encryption can be considered optional

The Internet keeps evolving, that's the only trend that has been keeping up, will RSS be the next technology to go the way of the gopher protocol?