I feel RSS/Atom feeds are still an extremely important way to subscribe to informational updates online - particularlly for news following/reading.
I have always been hopeful for projects like Zone (https://github.com/abouaziz/ZONE) to get more public interest, and RSS-social-reader products aimed at the facebook folks - such as http://newsbae.com, http://popurls.com, http://alltop.com, http://skimfeed.com, etc - will raise awareness of the need for the public to still want this simple service to exist.