RSS is the most important web 2.0 tool because it respects your privacy. When you pull information from another user – they know much less about you than when you read it on their website. They can’t set cookies.
When you read at a distance through RSS, at your convenience, your information isn’t given to the server you’re reading it on via cookie – no time or date stamp, no location rough estimate via IP, no browser information, no information about whether your using a mobile device or not – in fact most of that is irrelevant. It’s about the content of your post. You can choose to interact by posting a comment, which then can give the owner of the feed a bit of information should they want to.
It’s like standing in the square, yelling into a megaphone, announcing some great feat. Some will just listen, some may yell back in opposition, some will walk away. This is how the web should work.
This brief post was inspired by several, but most recently this post at O’Reilly Media about RSS decentralization and Dave Winer’s brilliant but underused RSS Cloud.