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Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Microsoft, lists, RSS and me Here's a preview of some RSS-related news coming later this week at .

The story begins in March of this year. I got a call from Robert Scoble saying there was a group on the MSIE team that wants to extend RSS to handle lists. I was immediately supportive of this, I told Scoble that some people think I'm conservative about extending RSS, but I'm actually liberal. The only thing I don't like is when people invent new ways of expressing data that RSS already defines. He assured me this isn't what was going on.

I assumed (incorrectly) that this group was interested in reading and writing lists of browser bookmarks in RSS. But I found out, when I visited in April, that while this is one of the applications they were considering, they were actually thinking bigger.

The first clue that something weird was happening at Microsoft around RSS was when Sean Lyndersay picked me up for dinner on the first night of my visit. I asked what part of Microsoft he worked for. He said he was on the RSS Team. I gulped. You mean there's an RSS Team at Microsoft? Yeah there is.

On Friday you'll see how deeply integrated RSS is in the architecture of the browser. But that's just the tip of what may turn out to be a very big iceberg. The people at Microsoft noticed something that I had seen, only peripherally -- that there were applications of RSS that aren't about news. Like Audible's NY Times Best Seller list, or an iTunes music playlist, or lists of Sharepoint documents, or browser bookmarks. Lists are all over the place, and people are starting to move them around via RSS, and they are not the usual kind of data that has been carried by RSS in the past.

Anyway, there's a lot to what they're doing, but I wanted to say in advance that I think what they're doing is cool. They apparently were concerned about what I would think. I want them to relax and give a really great demo on Friday, and know that the OPML Editor will support the very simple extensions to RSS that they are developing, and I look forward to collaborating on further extensions and perhaps even new formats as we go forward. I am pleased that Microsoft is working with the community, this is a new model for them, and it's hard for big companies to turn this kind of corner. I see that they're really trying, and I appreciate that, and welcome them.

My focus for ordered lists has been outlines, and that means OPML. But I think our visions are compatible, and I hope we can do more to bring our views together over time. I apologize that this post sounds so press-releasish, but that's the way these things go. I wrote this myself, did not get approval for the words, but did work with Amar Gandhi and Sean Lyndersay to agree on what I could talk about before Friday's announcements. So there's more to the story. And I hope everyone who's interested in RSS listens carefully. I know I will.

1 From www.reallysimplesyndication.com/2005/06/22 24 June 2005 Posted by on 6/22/05; 7:12:32 PM

2 From www.reallysimplesyndication.com/2005/06/22 24 June 2005