BITS is kind of interesting, although I think it poses some serious security and stability risks. It did get me thinking about a Net::Require::require implementation for Ruby again, though. So I guess it's not all bad.
Here is a brief list of Web Services vying for the place of RSS. From the article:
While these efforts are certainly worthwhile and promising, it will most likely take years before they pass the filters of real life use before they can claim widespread adoption. All of them ask for a thick infrastructure layer to support implementations. While possible, it is unlikely that mainstream deployment will be achieved instantly.
Translation: "It's fun to work on this stuff, but we already know our implementation won't scale and will be difficult for developers to use."
I love it when standards organizations find a simple format or protocol and say "Wow, that's a great idea. Let's create our own and tack on a bunch of unnecessary crap, making our standard complicated, slow, obtuse, and effectively irrelevant. HTTP perservered because it is simple. RSS is still kicking because it issimple. Is this concept difficult to grasp, or is the Committee Reality Distortion Vortex™ masking common sense again?
# delete the RSS equivalent of New Coke
rm -rf WS{XL,IL,RP}
# keep the good stuff around
chmod a-x RSS
Okay, </rant> :-)...