RSS Platform coming to XP

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/02/01/522481.aspx

This is a very interesting blog posting where a PM from the IE team says that the RSS platform will be part of IE7 on XP as well as on Vista. Up until know, Microsoft has said only that it "wanted" to make the platform available on XP but this is the first committment to do so. This is important because it means there’s a fighting chance that ISVs will use it.

Now, the RSS focus turns to other Microsoft groups. I see several important next steps:

First, Outlook 12 really should stop using it’s own feed store and sync engine and use the one in IE7. Outlook is a good place to read blogs from but it has no business maintaining an independent feed list and doing it’s own synchronization on XP or Vista.

Second, the photo tools going in to Vista really have to support RSS subscriptions at least as well as Apple’s iLife ‘06 does. If you aren’t familiar with what Apple is calling photocasting. Apple has taken flack over the technical details of some of its RSS extensions, but there’s no denying the coolness of the feature.

Third, Microsoft needs to provide some kind of registry or directory of audio and video podcasts. Their current approach is based on the idea that you find them by browsing the web in IE but Apple has shown the power of having an organized list that users can search and navigate. Windows Media Player 11 needs to offer a similar capability.

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Updated to fix links.
And to enable comments.