Microsoft: RSS, Longhorn

Dean Hachamovitch and Amar Gandhi:  from Microsoft.  This has been the most anticipated presentation of the conference.

• On their shirts:  “Longhorn (heart) RSS”. 
• “Longhorn is betting big on RSS, for End-users and developers.”
• First public demo of IE7.  In IE7, there will be an RSS button on the browser frame.  You can subscribe directly from the browser.  Sort of like Firefox.  The “new and improved” is that you can preview the feed.
• In Longhorn, there will be a common feed database.  So if you subscribe to something in IE7, you can pick up that subscription in FeedBandit, etc.
• “Feeds of content” – the enclosure tag in RSS can handle any type of content.
• Demo of RSS with Outlook calendaring.  Amar created an RSS feed of the Gnomedex calendar, with iCal items as enclosures.  Outlook reads this RSS feed directly, and puts it into an Outlook calendar.
• There is some disagreement in the room about how to handle calendar data in an RSS feed.  Some folks want iCal information represented as another namespace in the XML. 
• Demo of a screen saver subscribing to a photoblog.  (My perspective:  boring.)
• Another use of RSS:  managing lists.  Tag extension: marks feed as a list.  Allows people to subscribe to lists.
• Demo:  Subscribing to an Amazon wish list.  Using client to manipulate those lists.  Different categories of “things” have different meta-data:  books, DVDs, music, etc.
• The Simple List Extensions are being made available under the Creative Commons license.  That’s huge for Microsoft!
• Video:  Larry Lessig welcomes Microsoft into the Creative Commons community.  Marks a new era in the intellectual property community.
• The specs for Simple List Extensions and Windows RSS Platform Architectural Overview will be available here, after noon PDT.

My perspective:  No blockbuster announcement, but some good demonstration from MSFT of their commitment to RSS.  Especially important was their use of Creative Commons licensing. 

Interesting Q&A:  Some people are really challenging MSFT, as a “borg”.  The speakers were just attacked as “not working with the community”.  That got a mixed reaction from the crowd.

Seems like they are going to make most of the technology “down level”, to WindowsXP.  Perhaps as soon as this summer.

One of the sub-themes here is this “open source” crowd wrestling with the very proprietary Microsoft.  How do they work together?  Can they be friendly?  Everyone is trying to get a handle on that.