I (heart) RSS
When I heard that Jeremy got a job from Microsoft and it had something to do with his blog I was a bit surprised. It’s not like this hasn’t happened before somewhere and there’s no doubt more to that than just Jeremy’s writing skills involved, but still… I mean, how cool is that? Congratulations, again.
So, when Jeremy invited me to write something here I jumped at the chance. This all happily coincided with a piece of terribly misunderestimated [sic] piece of news, which centered on Microsoft, the destroyer of worlds and RSS, the nifty little format to distribute lists – the latter which happened to be something I rambled about a bit in my short-lived attempt to try ‘blogging’. I still don’t like it, I’m waiting for the next publishing format as this chronologically ordered stuff just doesn’t seem to do it to me. Even if it might be beneficial tool to journal project progress. (Yes, I’m waiting them to migrate to SPS 2007 at my organization. It’s going to be so cool.)
Anyway, back to the topic. If I had to choose the hottest tech from 2006, I’d go with RSS. What I mean by RSS here is both RSS and Atom, or pretty much any standard format of syndicating and distributing lists. In my opinion this tech is still emerging and gaining momentum, partly thanks to the blogging phenomenon, which created a need to quickly skim what’s new on so many blogs.
Now, many could argue that in 2005-2006 RSS/Atom started to mature or maybe stagnate, but not me. Maybe the specifications have finally matured enough, but there’s a lot of adopting and figuring out what to do with it to be done. Around Christmas the news broke that Microsoft had ‘patented’ RSS , which of course put everyone at arms and accusing Microsoft of stealing an open format. Of course, the patent has nothing to do with RSS the specification or RSS readers, but with the idea of central operating system level APIs to manipulate subscriptions. Which is kinda nice idea. What I find powerful in OS X are the frameworks, which f.e. enable Adium to take advantage of information in Address Book or SubEthaEdit to do it’s thing through Bonjour. And I really have to mention Growl here too.
Lists are a fun concept, and with RSS and especially Atom, it’s really versatile to go beyond ‘Rich Site Summaries’. And I believe the guys at Microsoft have figured this out. Remember Simple List Extensions or Simple Sharing Extensions ? These extensions enable RSS-feeds to be more than just chronologically sorted lists of new posts from your favourite blogs. Don’t worry if you don’t, I don’t know if anyone besides Microsoft has actually adopted these extensions or anything, even though they were published sometime in 2005. I’m also yet to find a news story connecting these dots to the recent RSS-patent ‘scandal’.
I’ve yet to have hands-on experience with Vista (wink, wink), but at least a while back when it was still called Longhorn, I remember reading that it would support RSS in new, cool ways. And to keep the guys at Cupertino at bay, Microsoft naturally needs to patent their idea of RSS framework. What I can’t understand is why hasn’t Apple already done this? Or did they rephrase their RSS patents differently?
Unlike certain open source efforts, it seems that Microsoft has understood the power of universal standard for lists. Posts in a blog? A list. Your address book? A list. Your calendar? A list (okay, there’s iCalendar already, but in iCal bi-directionality is non-existent at least pre-Leopard). Your contact list in Skype/MSN Live Messenger/whatever? A list. Your photos at Flickr ? A list. Your playlist? A list. Your favourite links ? A list. Your e-mail ? A list. Your to-do list ? Well, a list.
These lists act as database views and it definitely makes sense to centralize these through OS-level APIs. RSS has depreciated and made redundant many niche formats, like M3U and maybe even iCalendar. The simplicity and versatility of RSS has accelerated its adoption. And Microsoft got it.
Kari is an IT project manager at an utility company and when not managing the ensuing chaos finally understood what he studied while reading ‘Freakonomics’ which helped him accept fantasizing about (statistical) models, but still has a secret passion with Veronica Mars .
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Hey Kari,
Congrats on your first post on Tech IT Easy. Hope it’s just the beginning. By the way, very interesting.
2 quick remarks:
1) so, according to you, the hottest 2006 tech is RSS. Right. I have to say RSS democratization in 2006 has been brilliant and many businesses relying on Really Simple Syndication have been flourishing all around. But hasn’t RSS existed for 2/3 years already? On the other hand, I don’t think the RSS democratization is over. It’s only the beginning. Put geeks on the side and you’ll realize that very few people actually know what RSS is about.
2) True, Microsoft ‘has understood the power of universal standards for lists’. I noticed that alongside with ‘ecosystem’, the hottest words in Microsoftees mouths is ‘interoperability’.
1) Jeremy, I always root for the underdog, in my opinion RSS-style technologies are understated and the ubiquitous orange rectangle is doing disservice to it. Very few people know what HTML stands for, or IMAP for that matter, but they still seem to be happy with what these to things deliver.
2) Interoperability was, in my opinion, the key to all things happening on web in 2006. I’m not that much into Semantic Web stuff, but Tim Berner-Lee’s vision for agent-agnostic content is something I’d like see more of. This is why I find certain dangers in AJAX, because we seem to be going backwards to the days of “You need to use IE 4.0 to see this site”-banners and erratic behaviour of websites on different browsers – just when people were learning to use CSS right.
[...] on different sites like Flickr, Twitter et al. by using their feeds. I’ve previosuly written on how in 2006 I thought feeds were the real meat of the web. Anyway, fortunately, I never spent any time on my site as Plaxo Pulse does all this for me and [...]