• by Shankar Gupta , June 27, 2005

As expected, Microsoft Friday unveiled plans to increase support for RSS applications in the upcoming seventh version of Internet Explorer, as well as its upcoming operating system, code-named Longhorn.

The move signals the increasing importance of RSS technology, said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst with Jupiter Research. "First and foremost, this announcement really demonstrates how mainstream RSS has become, and now we're really seeing the big players get involved," Gartenberg said. The upcoming changes in Explorer and Longhorn will make RSS available to all users of the new Windows platform; today, RSS is mainly used by a narrow, tech-savvy group.

Microsoft announced its RSS plans in Seattle at Gnomedex, a conference about grassroots media such as RSS, blogging, and podcasting. The new RSS functions that will be included in Longhorn include a common list of RSS feeds that the user subscribes to, which can be accessed by any application; a data-storing application that will aggregate all the data downloaded to the hard drive via RSS feeds; and a synchronization engine that will automatically update RSS-based applications.

In addition to the Longhorn support for RSS, Microsoft also intends to refine the way RSS lists are encoded, in order to allow programs to determine when a new item has been added, as well as when the items in the list have changed order. The new revisions to the technology are being released to the public under a Creative Commons license.

Gartenberg said that Microsoft's decision to allow public access to the new RSS extensions might help assuage fears that Microsoft is trying to take over the medium. "In the past, when Microsoft would talk about 'embrace and extend,' often the industry would see that as engulf and devour," he said. "Microsoft has gone a long way in the release to show that they're extending RSS, not co-opting RSS."