Is RSS the TiVo of the Web?

It's an interesting idea: equating RSS feeds with TiVo. For those of you who don't know, TiVo is a device that constantly streams television feeds to a hard disk. That way, you can decide half way through a show to record from the beginning. You can also pause live TV, record shows a week or two out with one click, and much more. The point is, it is a revolutionary step in the watching of television and those of us who have it can't imagine life before TiVo.

So, is RSS (and Atom) as big for the Web as TiVo is for television? "If you're not reading it in RSS you're wasting your time," declaimed Microsoft's blogging evangelist, Robert Scoble, who says he subscribes to nearly 1,300 feeds.

RSS has been called the TiVo of the Web, the first "killer app" of the anticipated automation of social and commercial transactions online using the Web's second-generation XML (extensible markup language) standard. --Business Tech Wire

Is Blogger correct after all with going with Atom rather than RSS? It would appear so now that Anil Dash has put the TypePad stamp of approval on Atom. RSS or Atom, Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny sees it this way:

"Remember when you first starting seeing URLs appear on billboards and at the end of movie trailers?" Zawodny wrote in his blog in December. "It's going to be like that. One day we're just going to look around and realize that RSS is popping up all over the place. And a couple years later, we'll all wonder how we ever got along without it."