For that matter, I think RSS is still needed for blog aggregation and reading... Since google killed reader and iGoogle, I find myself only reading a handful of sites regularly.
Agreed. RSS is an amazing technology, but I miss a real good feedreader. I loved FeedDemon, but since its development stopped it got so sluggish when handling my RSS feeds.
Emacs has several, and since I tend to live in Emacs I never really noticed the whole Reader saga.
I would definitely be sad if I couldn't get my RSS feeds next to my NNTP and my IMAP in gnus.
There is also elfeed for Emacs: https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed As good as butter-on-toast. It has a big list of news items with good support for (multi-)tagging and can use curl to fetch quite fast (2.0 feature, set `url-queue-parallel-processes' as high as you can, I've it set to 20).
There's also newsticker.el but I never could get it to work.