Steve Gillmor makes the case for RSS in a memo to Steve Ballmer.
“Steve, you need to support RSS. Where do I want to go today? To my RSS reader.”
While I think Steve’s memo makes some good points and suggestions, I think it is unclear as to exactly how Microsoft needs to do to “support” RSS. Unless there is a technology that can be built into Windows–I don’t see how to do that with RSS–then it is up to the individual product managers to build RSS support. If the application produces content, then it needs a feed. If the application reads content, then it needs to consume RSS. Although I think the last thing we need from Microsoft is yet another news aggregator.
Maybe Steve Gillmor just wants Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer to mention RSS more often publicly. Maybe he wants a company mandate for products to support feeds and aggregation. Whatever the intention, I think the idea was good, I’m just not sure how the response is going to turn out.
Scoble responds and says that he would love to show Ballmer the beauties of RSS and point out how the smart guys in search could get a leg up with RSS. (He points to Feedster, Technorati, and PubSub.) So obviously he disagrees with my thinking that it is unclear what Microsoft should do to support RSS.
