Outlook and RSS

As big as the blogosphere is today the RSS explosion yet to come requires two things:

(1) the killer application for reading feeds

(2) a simple, consistent and generally understood way of subscribing to feeds

Robert Scoble's recent post (reproduced below) links to the blog of a Program Manager on the Outlook team. Having had a look at the source post I believe that the basis of the killer feed reader is being built into Outlook. Robert points out that synchronisation across PC's would be a killer feature, as would the capability to post to your own blog from Outlook.

Michael Affronti is a program manager on Microsoft’s Outlook team and is starting to write about the future of Outlook. Here he’s writing about RSS Aggregation into Outlook 12. I haven’t yet played with this feature. One reason? I’m happily stuck in the NewsGator family of products due to its synchronization features. See, if I read a feed on NewsGator on my desktop PC (which, ironically enough, gives you similar features to Outlook 12 in today’s Outlook) it marks it as read on the Web service and also on NewsGator on my Tablet PC and also on my new SmartPhone (and soon it’ll be synchro’ed with NetNewsWire on the Macintosh and FeedDemon and RSS Bandit on Windows) and also on the Media Center PC that’ll soon run my home office (which is how I’ll display stuff on my HDTV screen at home when I get that next year).

It’s going to be very hard for me to give up NewsGator because of this synchronization. Hey, Michael, is Outlook 12’s aggregator gonna hook up to NewsGator?

That said, don’t underestimate the effect of Outlook 12’s support of RSS here. It’ll bring millions of new businesspeople into the RSS world. This is HUGE. Outlook is probably the most used application in the world after Internet Explorer (and, on my desktop, is used more often than IE).

Via: [Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger]