Solo Technology

As I was perusing the microsoft IE blog today, I came across a post titled “Windows RSS Platform.” I’ve since dried off my keyboard, but I have to confess my reaction was darned close to a spit-take. Anyways, while I’m sure this has been written about extensively in the past, I sure missed it.
Apparently, this was something that was originally going to be released with Vista:

[...] The RSS functionality in IE7 is “powered” by the Windows RSS Platform. The Windows RSS Platform API encapsulates 3 main components: Common Feed List, Feed Synchronization Engine, and Feed Store.

The RSS functionality in IE7 is built on top of these components. While we previously announced that the Windows RSS Platform would be available for Windows Vista, we are extremely pleased to announce that the Windows RSS Platform will also be available as part of Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1 and Windows XP 64-bit.

Ok, then we get the standard “building block architecture” paragraph. Markitecture tends to make my eyes droop… However, plowing on, the author writes a paragraph that I know I could’ve written and I perk back up:

Like many of you, I’ve been running several RSS applications (aggregators, pod casters, etc…) for some time and am subscribed to close to 100 feeds. Each time I start using another RSS application I play the “game” of OPML export and import. This quickly becomes a hassle, especially when I lose track of feeds because I subscribed to or deleted feeds in different applications and hence my feed lists are no longer in sync.

Amen Walter, sing it! From there, the post goes on to explain how this vision will make your life better and your teeth shiny and clean. I think there’s even baby bluebirds flitting about in the background…

Ok, seriously, I think this is pretty damned progressive for Microsoft and am very interested to see how it works out. Because, if they don’t get it right, you can bet someone else will take this exact same conceptual idea (feed store, feed synch engine and common feed list) and run with it. That common feed list notion is pretty wild and very interesting.
The RSS Team Blog is some interesting reading too. They talk about Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) in a few of their articles.

I have a project from work in mind that would benefit from SSE: Keeping two different issue tracking systems in lock-step. Ours and a clients’. Problem is, they’d both need external interfaces to make it happen. Mine can output RSS and has a non-rss input API. Dunno about the other, but if we ever get the time to give it a go it would sure be interesting.

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