Microsoft's RSS Longhorn Announcement

Microsoft and RSS - Making RSS Invisible!


At the beginning of this year I wrote a simple article entitled
'10 Reasons To Put RSS On Your Site'. In that article,
which can be found floating around the web, I stated
that 2005 would be the 'breakout' year for RSS. Really
put RSS into the spotlight once and for all.

Microsoft's announcement of its plans to place RSS features
into its Longhorn operating system, in the next Windows version
- due out in 2006 and in servers in 2007 is a great leap forward
for RSS. Read more about this in this eWeek Article by Peter Galli.

This takes RSS out of just RSS readers and browsers - giving it
much more powerful applications. Most interesting is a new set of
applications - Simple List Extensions - allowing web sites to
publish feeds containing lists such as a wish list or top
10 list. Might make Letterman happy!!

Subscribing to a web site or feed just got a lot easier.

What's really important about Microsoft's plans (I believe)
- is the fact that this now makes RSS legit. Lets face it,
outside of blogging and few alert online marketers, RSS is
still not understood by the majority of people.

Lets hope it stays that way!

People don't have to understand 'html' to enjoy the Internet.
They don't really have to know about servers, DOS, or even
ISPs to get full benefit from the web. Likewise, RSS doesn't
have to known or even understood by the majority of the people
who will be using it.

This is a great step to making RSS a seamless, invisible
part of computing and the Internet.

Lets hope they get it right!


Titus Hoskins
www.bizwaremagic.com