Microsoft Plays Catch-up Again
Once again, Microsoft is late for the ball. Adding to their long list of technologies including searching, browsers, and the Internet, we can now add RSS. Microsoft has a long history of dismissing technology just to watch it blossom elsewhere while then being forced to play catch-up years later. This time its with RSS.
Another habitual stunt they like to pull is bastardizing that technology to work for them (and hopefully no one else). So obviously, the RSS announcement they made at Gnomedex today was a scary one for us RSS freaks. But just maybe it’s not.
Microsoft is planning on extending the RSS document standard to support lists. Scary. Microsoft will publish its changes under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. Awesome. This couldn’t be cooler. This is a big leap for Microsoft and one that should really be commended.
Dave dropped his thoughts and some info on the announcement mentioning that Microsoft contacted him beforehand to get his permission approval. But what got Dave was Microsoft’s ideas on using RSS.
They’re plan is to extend RSS in order to use it for ordered lists. RSS is primarily used for news and more recently for distributing podcasts. But one use of RSS that others have been employing, me included, is to use RSS for simple lists. You’ll recall that I used to have about 3 to 4 lists on my sidebar on my old site design, and I frequently author feeds that list things. My AzureusRSS script was made to list the current downloads in Azureus. My Newzbin feeds (could arguably be listed under the updated content column) list the last few items posted on Usenet. My Broadcathing feed listed the last few shows that had been “gotten”. I used Audioscrobbler’s rss feed to show the last few songs that I’ve listened to. The list (no pun intended) goes on. This is the great thing about RSS, its use really never ends. Whether you’re using it for notification, updated info, subscribing to media, or just to feed a list of data into a format to show off, RSS is incredibly malleable.
Microsoft is planning on using RSS throughout Longhorn. There’s tons of places that RSS belongs within and operating system and after numerous big features being dropped from their next OS, this is a major one being tagged on. The question is… will they get its implementation right? We all know the 3.0 rule from Microsoft. 1.0 features rarely ever work as intended, especially in the usability arena. But from the looks of it, the RSS team (yes they have one) is getting in cahoots with all the right people and executing a hugely community based technology in just the right ways.