RSS gives the user maximum control - but it lacks the social features. What we need is a way to connect our RSS feeds together.
"What we need is a way to connect our RSS feeds together." Could you flesh this out a little? What is it that you want to see?
I would like to publish an output from my reading as RSS channels - then other people could subscribe to those channels making a full circle. I don't know what these channels would be - we could start with simple 'liked articles', then readers would count in how many 'liked channels' from friends a given article is and do other heuristics. But everybody would be able to make his own channels and then observe if people subscribe to them. In general it would be like a Facebook feed - but the algorithm would be executed on the user machine and defined by him.