Longhorn Loves RSS
MSFT had a big announcement today at the Gnomedex conference in Seattle. Their announcement is that for a while now, they've had an RSS team at MSFT (they've been referring to themselves as part of the IE 7 team for secrecy). They've built an RSS platform for the Windows OS and have hooked up the latest build of IE7 to it. Similiar to Mac's Safari browser (very similiar!), IE 7 has an RSS feed view. RSS feeds are automatically detected by IE and you click a button to display them in the browser.
The bigger news is that you can easily subscribe to feeds that get added to 'The Common Feed list.' There is a standard API that developers can then use to query this list from any application. The platform takes care of managing the list. Anyone can use this common list on the user's box (i.e. they have a demo that shows RSS Bandit using the list).
But, it looks like the RSS platform enables much more. The RSS platform:
- Builds a baseline set of experiences for RSS so users can tap into it. They want RSS to be usable by everyone (i.e. my mom), and not just the top 5% of Internet users.
- The RSS platform will make it easy for developers to use RSS for everything. Their motto is 'RSS for everything, all the time.'
- They are adding a set of extensions to RSS which allows content publishers to define lists, and consumers to read these lists. The publisher can tag lists, marking interesting data in lists, etc. Their also publishing the specification to these new extensions as a Creative Commons license. They want the extensions to be used 'widely and broadly.'
The big idea here is that they want to use feeds for everything. So, instead of just being able to subscribe to RSS feeds for blogs and for podcasts, I can now subscribe to someone's Contacts RSS Feed (i.e. that Outlook will make available), or a Calendar Feed, etc. One of the demos showed Outlook consuming a calendar from someone else that was a published RSS feed.
There is a video on Channel 9 that has some interesting demos. From the video, it sounds like they're planning on having something ready for people to play with by the PDC.
Microsoft clearly thinks that RSS is something that everyone will be using in the future, whether the user knows it or not. What's nice is that, for developers, we can make use of all of these different feeds without having to rewrite the common RSS plumbing for consuming, publishing feeds, etc.
I've read on other blgos that MSFT plans to make this available for XP as well.
Paul