Microsoft: Browse. Search. Subscribe!

Here’s some notes I took from the keystone by Dean Hachamovitch from Microsoft:

• Longhorn *heart* RSS
• Microsoft is betting big on RSS for Longhorn. They want to “RSS everything”.
• They are using IE7 to show off the RSS experiences in Longhorn. This is the first public demo of IE7. IE7 now supports auto-discovery of feeds much like Firefox, an icon lights up on the toolbar. You can also view a preview of the feed, complete with search-in-page functionality. You can then subscribe to the feed in much the same way as a user would add a Favorite in IE today.
• Now they are using MSN Search to search for Gnomedex, to display that it has an RSS feed that you can subscribe to.
• Longhorn has the concept of a “subscription store” called a “common feed list”, so that all applications can hook into the same collection of feeds using the Windows API. This is the killer RSS feature for Longhorn, IMO. They are showing how this works with a new build of RSS Bandit.
• They just thanked Dave Winer for inventing the enclosure tag. Was that necessary? You can only beat a dead horse so many times…
• Now they’re showing how the Outlook calendar works with the whole Subscribe mentality. They visited the HTML schedule page for Gnomedex, and created an RSS feed from it. Now they have a special program that looks in the common feed list for feeds with calendar objects, and then adds them as appointments into Outlook.
• Wow, someone at the front made a comment and just got chopped.
• Oooh, pretty little demo of a photo blog being downloaded and the photos displayed in a screensaver complete with captions and descriptions. Very neat way of visualizing a photoblog.
• Now they’re talking about the extensions to RSS that they are proposing. One of them allows RSS to work better with lists. Another allows a publisher to describe the content of the feed. They worked with Amazon.com to create RSS feeds out of the Amazon Wishlists as an example.
• The specification for the Simple List Extensions is going to be released under a Creative Commons License. They played a video from Larry Lessig welcoming Microsoft into the CC family.
• As of noon today, there will be an architectual overview document on RSS in Longhorn and specs for the Simple List Extensions avaiable on the web.
• Schedule: Longhorn Beta 1 is set for PDC05, and will contain some of the envisioned RSS experience.
• “This is the start of the conversation.”

All pretty cool stuff. I can’t wait to see the first beta of Longhorn, it should be pretty awesome if all of this stuff is implemented and working well.

Read: Gnomedex