No, I don't think so. Most people just like to kick back and watch TV. However, those who rabidly consume RSS will be better prepared and advantage. - Mike Reynolds

RSS is already mainstream, but requires disguise via personal homepages and updates of Facebook or MySpace. People are intimidated by acronyms for some reason. - Andy Angelos

Eventually our refrigerators will be transmitting, or receiving, something very much like an RSS feed. (And it won't be a Flickr meme.) By definition, under the hood communications are under the hood. Then there is the 10% of the population like me that can spell RSS, and the 1% of the population (the rest of you) who actually understand it. - Ontario Emperor

Most of my family and friends would give me a funny look if I asked them what RSS is. They still just use email for sending messages and mostly only read MSM websites. I don't see them using RSS unless it's for things like what Andy said above in Facebook where they don't know that it's RSS, only what it does. - Devin Anderson

Wait a minute - how did refrigerators get involved? RSS will need to be called something else and painted in a different color (I nominate puce) before it's accepted by the general public. I love my GReader but it's going to have to get *much* prettier than that. - Carla Thompson

I *like* Ontario's comment. - Mike Reynolds

How about when companies use it more? You get employees used to RSS feeds at the office, they'll start to understand them. I think exposure is key - setting up an RSS reader isn't as interesting as say...joining Facebook. Left to their own devices, it's going to take a while for consumers to adopt. - Hutch Carpenter

RSS is such a daily part of my life, that I think I mistook it as being mainstream. I had no idea it wasn't. That said, I'm pretty sure my mom doesn't know what an RSS feed is. For me, though... if it doesn't have RSS, I'm not really interested. - Vince DeGeorge

RSS as a protocol, for behind the scenes stuff, will. But raw consumption of RSS feeds will not. Traditional feed readers are for geeks - Aviv

I'm interested to know if people are using "RSS" here in a generic way, to mean a feed. Ontario Emperor is right that it will be under the hood, but it will be Atom (syndication and publishing) doing interesting and pervasive things rather than RSS. - Michael C. Harris

Will SMTP ever go mainstream? Most people I talk to have never even heard of it. - Paul Buchheit

@Jason Kaneshiro Even casual users like the idea of a one-stop shop for all your news, though. At least the ones I've spoken with. I do think Ontario and Alltop are on the right track, that we can't call it RSS and we need to shove it under the covers. - Carla Thompson

/me likes integration of RSS into XHTML2 e.g. <h1 rel="rss:title">My blog post</h1>. HTML is already designed to be media and layout neutral so there's nothing that says it can't be used as a subscription format too, as that would get rid of an additional redundant output format. - Philipp Lenssen

Mainstream doesn't care what RSS is or how it works, as long as it fills a need. Yes, it will go mainstream but probably not as RSS. To Paul's point - email is what matters, protocol (technology) is irrelevant. - MiaD

As more and more services do interesting things with RSS, the usage will continue to increase. FriendFeed is a great example of a site that users don't have to know what RSS is to take advantage of the benefits. - Caleb Elston

I'm thinking this through. "Email" and "IM" have become generic terms that don't hint at the underlying protocols. Perhaps the word "feed" will become genericized in a similar fashion, probably as a verb (I'm gonna feed my car's gas consumption). And Carla, I'm not a fan of puce. - Ontario Emperor

@Ontario lol. cerulean then? persimmon? - Carla Thompson