RSS Getting Mainstream :Microsoft Joins The RSS Party

True to its style of entering late but casting the net wide – Microsoft announces support fot RSS. The technology makes it convenient for Web users to keep tabs on their favorite blogs, news feeds, columnists, and video by signing up to have updates automatically zapped to their PCs or mobile devices.Microsoft, which has largely been on the sidelines as RSS gained in popularity, announced plans to bake RSS technology into Longhorn. Microsoft's mere presence in the market will do one thing that all the other companies combined haven't been able to achieve yet: It will make RSS mainstream technology.

Michael Gartenberg, vice-president and research director at Jupiter Research, estimates that about 10% of U.S. Web surfers use RSS readers, software designed to view feeds from Web sites. "This is the type of thing that will bring it into the mainstream," Gartenberg says. "It's going to change behavior, and it's going to do it very quickly." Microsoft is going after the RSS market in a very un-Microsoft-like way - it's making its RSS technology available for free using the so-called Creative Commons license. Before Microsoft brings out the new technology with Longhorn, it'll make RSS feeds readable from inside its widely used Internet Explorer browser. Would it be just the readers – no – RSS centric applications could be the next.A husband, for example, could not only track his wife's wish list on Amazon using RSS but he could also sort through the list and find all the books under $30, or everything related to gardening. All Amazon would need to do is tap into the code that Microsoft would make available in Longhorn.Scobleizer points to this view from the Longhorn & RSS team from Microsoft – key thing to watch here is the news about new RSS extension to be released into creative commons. Microsoft says it wants to make RSS better because it's so powerful.Providing developers new extensions to RSS is significant in many ways. RSS is becoming mainstream and the big players are getting involved. Ignoring RSS could result missing out major opportunities.