The guestbook is actually a very watered down version of a forum, as forums were first with systems like PLATO. That system in particular provided the foundation for many of the messaging technologies we use on the internet now.

Using a modern variant, Facebook is essentially nothing more than a huge multi-tiered forum system. It has profiles, flat discussions (“wall” posts,) private messaging and so on. The difference is that it can be extended thru the use of applications, which is something traditional forums don’t do on a user level.

Some say RSS is a dead duck. I don’t think so either since the technology is so tightly integrated into all major browser offerings. I mean, you don’t just put in all that effort into coding RSS support into a browser only to have it yanked out a few years later. That just wouldn’t make sense.

I’m also not sure that RSS is going to disappear soon. Yes, I click on links from the people I follow in Twitter, but those are people, not necessarily blogs. For example, I just came to this post via RSS, not via PC Mech’s tweet. I like RSS in that I can get around to viewing that new blog entry when I feel like it. With Twitter, there’s a good chance a link will get lost in the huge number of tweets I receive before I can get to it.

Back in the day, my website had both a guestbook and was in a webring. The guestbook did work well enough, and the webring did lead to some traffic according to my awesome stat counter. So they weren’t entirely useless.