Nobody uses RSS. I know because I struggled for months to build a more understandable feedreader (http://readwarp.com).

Oh come on. We've had this discussion about RSS before (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2060298 was the last big one), and plenty of people are using it in some capacity.

Perhaps I should have rephrased: few people use RSS. Orders of magnitude fewer than those using twitter. Do you agree?

An order of magnitude fewer people use RSS than use Twitter, but fewer people use Twitter for the use case that RSS serves than use RSS for that purpose.

I disagree. I think more people get their news from Twitter by following people they want to receive news from. What's more, the number of such people grows everyday, far faster than for RSS.

I know what's your point, but I do use rss constantly and I don't find your page very usable, so maybe that's not the problem with your app.

Yeah it was intended for people who don't understand RSS (or who, like me, subscribe to 800 feeds. The problems are the same at both ends of the spectrum).

And yes I'm sure there's lots wrong with it. I built a recommendation system, but I stopped hacking on it when I realized that people liked a story more if I lied that their friend shared it. That's what twitter has: social proof.

what I wanted to say is, your app needs a designer's touch. f.ex. http://goodnoows.com/ has a nice feeeling (although I don't use it, partly because I even can't import my netvibes opml in there)

Yeah that's valid, thanks for the opinion.

I also built http://hackerstream.com, so this is a more general problem with my design skills.

I don't have opml import either, but if you mail me your opml I'll set you up with an account (email in profile; let me know what username you want)

I've found that many companies use RSS as an organizational format behind-the-scenes, but no consumers actually use it.