Ignore Microsoft’s RSS Moves
So, Microsoft announced operating system-wide support for RSS in longhorn last week, but what grabbed more attention was that Microsoft also announced their own extension to RSS.
First off, Microsoft is arriving late to this party, and not in the fashionable manner. Sure, they’re releasing it under a kinder license than usual, but the whole thing smacks of “See? We like blogging and Creative Commons and RSS! We’re cool kids too!”
So, how should we all react to this news?
- If you’re a developer, ignore all of this. Every little bit of it. Don’t implement this addition in your code. It would be silly of you to do so. There are better advancements going on elsewhere that will see the light of day much much sooner. By the time Microsoft gets it’s implementation out the door, we’ll have already evolved to the next thing.
- If you’re a future user of longhorn, then it’ll probably be beneficial to have RSS support native to the OS (although you have another eighteen months to wait to enjoy something the rest of us have been enjoying for quite some time.)
- If you make an RSS reader for Windows, get ready to be pushed off the map when longhorn arrives.
If Microsoft wants to show it’s support and love of RSS, it should start by adding RSS feeds to it’s websites.
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Incorporation of RSS feeds into the OS is a good move. I’m sure they will also incorporate some type of feed generation or blogging as well. I only hope an innovation is made to help customize the RSS Aggregator front-end. The mass number of blogs and RSS feeds are making way for a strip mall look and feel all over the net.