With the rise of Twitter and social networking news streams, many techies have been debating the value and livelihood of RSS. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a common format used to share a constant stream of articles. Popularized by blogs, RSS can be imported by RSS readers (like Google Reader; here’s my little guide to them).

Back in May, TechCrunch already pronounced RSS dead which makes it more shocking that today, again, Sam Diaz reveals he’s not using RSS anymore. And so the conversation begins. Marshall Kirkpatrick defends RSS as another of his many research tools while Robert Scoble has moved on to Twitter and FriendFeed for news.

Let’s not confuse death with evolution. RSS has always been a tool, a tool still used by, shockingly Twitter, Facebook, and Friendfeed.  While some find basic RSS readers less valuable, this is because innovators have found ways to make finding information on the web more useful and more valuable.  New tools like Feedly and LazyFeed are making RSS more valuable, and in some cases, unrecognizable from its original state. The internet is, obviously, moving so quickly (just watch Twitter update), that it’s impossible to believe the same tools we use today will be the same tools used next year. Nothing disappears, it evolves into something better.

Of course, I still love my RSS Reader.

I updated my Twitter status which, through TwitterSync, updated my Facebook status. Facebook, in turn, updated my FriendFeed with that status, but Twitter already updated FriendFeed. Suddenly I realized data portability is closer than we think.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the Info Wars brewing between the social networks on their desire to control our information. MySpace, Facebook, and Google launched their own social networking networking service, allowing users and 3rd-parties to access information inside each walled garden. Facebook quickly blocked Google’s service claiming privacy issues, an attempt to protect its users.

Facebook forgot its API already allows an immense amount of access to user information. Many leading social sites offer APIs, or application programming interfaces, that allow other sites to integrate each other’s systems. Facebook, for all the criticism of its walled garden mentality, is able to import data from many sites and external sites, like FriendFeed, can have data exported. I can’t move all my friends from one site to another…yet. But smaller social networks like Twitter are almost completely functional without ever going to Twitter.com.

The dream is control our content. Now we can just manipulate it. It’s a start. And competition, from new and old and in between social networks will force more open standards that make every site more valuable to users.