Mike Torres spent a few minutes putting together a list of companies that don’t use the term RSS. Firefox. Bloglines. SixApart. Etc. He concludes:
I didn’t spend more than three minutes because after about three minutes, I realized Microsoft isn’t trying to rename RSS and I stopped. RSS stopped being used long ago…
Conclusion: RSS is a great technology and a lousy brand. If you want people to actually use the technology, you need to find a better way to explain it to them.
(Background here.)
It’s a lousy brand, but it’s also lousy terminology. The term RSS doesn’t encompass the variety of web feeds out there now: e.g. ATOM is not RSS, but it IS a “web feed.”