Love is a beautiful thing. And it'll be really beautiful for a lot of Web users if it turns out to be true, as was announced last week, that Microsoft loves RSS.
RSS stands for, among other things, Really Simple Syndication. It allows your computer to check "feeds" from your favorite Web sites throughout the day. An RSS "feed reader" then displays a summary of any new items it finds.
If you haven't heard about RSS, you're not alone. Marketing Sherpa, an online consulting group, reported in May that only 4% of U.S. Internet users have any experience with RSS feeds. That compares with 91% who use e-mail on a regular basis.
RSS is rapidly gaining adherents, however — growth that will surely accelerate because of an announcement on June 24 by Microsoft's development team for the forthcoming Internet Explorer 7.0.
Native RSS Support in IE 7?
The Redmond developers revealed alpha IE 7.0 screen shots — for the first time anywhere, they said — at Gnomedex, a gathering of almost 400 bloggers, who currently are the most prolific publishers of RSS feeds.
"We're betting big on RSS," the conference community was told by Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft's group manager for Longhorn Browsing and RSS Technologies. Rather than waiting for Longhorn, the next consumer version of Windows (which is expected in late 2006), the IE team is gearing up to release a beta of IE 7 this summer, with the final version to be available as a free download as early as the end of 2005.
RSS support in Windows is crucial for the news-feed technology to become anywhere near as widespread as e-mail. Unless the right things happen in your Web browser when you click an RSS icon, the experience can be very confusing.
Contents:
1. Native RSS Support for IE 7?
2. The User Interface Booby Prize
3. A Few Issues Remain Open for Discussion
