If you'd like to know more about the inside of RSS and it's history, this article does a nice job. It's difficult to accurately speculate about the future of RSS, and I have my own ideas about how it can be effectively used for events, contact & phonebook information, travel information and more.

Written by Alex Iskold, the article gives a good measure of "why" behind the "how":

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_future_of_rss.php