Nick Bradbury at Bradsoft has a great post on his weblog regarding the Microsoft announcement that it is baking RSS support into Longhorn. If you don’t know how the announcement might effect you then Nick’s post is worth the read.
I think RSS support in Longhorn and IE7 is going to be great for all of us. As long as Microsoft doesn’t try to make the current RSS standard their own and shares with the rest of the world the improvements it intends to make, then it will be good for all of us.
The reason for Microsoft seemingly sudden support and interest in RSS makes those familiar with the company a bit skeptical of their intentions. My take on this is:
- Longhorn is late, add features people will want.
- Avalon is irrelevant, add features people will want.
- RSS holds key information to the data people WANT to see, key to personal search and the battle with Google and Yahoo.
The last item is the real key to why I think Microsoft is interested in RSS and the key to the data we are personally interested in holds. I don’t mind Microsoft or anyone else for that matter using my personal data to improve my computing experience as long as I get to be the keeper of that data….since it is MY data.
We will see what the future holds and the "real" interest Microsoft has in RSS.