donloeb.com

the transcript of gates’ keynote at the Microsoft MIX06 conference is a must read - all the way through. what made the team at FeedBurner quite happy was that he dedicated a fair amount of time to RSS.

RSS is about to explode, partly due to Microsoft, but also because Yahoo, Google, and AOL are focusing on this. the masses are coming to full-text RSS in ‘06 - My Yahoo!, Yahoo! Mail, IE7, and Vista (even with the recently announced delay) are set to get real distribution…

here are bill’s RSS comments:

RSS

RSS, a lot of discussion about that. We’ve seen it do a number of things that we’ve put out as industry standards for people to adopt around RSS. We think it’s very, very important. We’ve got the simple list extensions that make feeds better particularly for structured data. We think the amount of RSS going on is going to skyrocket. It’s already very significant. It will move up to new levels. And making it easy for you to manage those feeds so that they show up in the appropriate place, and some of the same mechanisms that we’ve thought about with things like e-mail rules can be applied here so that even when your information comes in it’s coming to exactly the place that you’re interested in seeing it. We’re going beyond just a textual-type notification where people will have photos and the podcasts themselves.

When you think about RSS as the start of a programmable Web, as you expose APIs to your Web sites, amazing things can happen. eBay, of course, is an extreme example where over half the product listings now are done in a programmatic way. And the tools that are turning the Internet essentially into a programming environment where any Web site is almost like a component in a software application, where you make a request to it like you would a subroutine call, it comes back asynchronously with the information, that’s allowing people to think through architectures in a very different way. We have lots of software tools to help with these messaging type connections. The richest is around a set of standards called WS*. We call that the Windows Communication Framework that was code-named “Indigo,” and there’s a lot of industry support for those strong standards. And what you get there is, without your having to write a lot of complex code, exchanges where you’re calling a Web site to do something can actually be secure, you can exchange a lot of rich information, and actually pick in that protocol suite exactly what - tuned for the interaction that you want there. So, you can move from very simple types of Web call requests all the way up to the highly structured environment without you having to do a lot of software work.

Ray Ozzie, of course, is the person we have very focused on this new application pattern, and most recently he came out, and I hope many of you saw it, and talked about the idea of thinking of the Web as a place that you can exchange information with what he called the Live Clipboard, an analogy to what we’ve done between applications on the PC now working between Web sites. Whether it’s programmatic or the user being able to take pieces and combine them, this idea of modularity, Web sites being able to specialize in something and then being able to connect and get together in a rich way, that’s a powerful idea whose time has come, and we’re just really at the very beginning of taking advantage of that.

Tags: rss, yahoo, microsoft |