The Day RSS Turned Pro

This AP Photo says a lot. It's a picture of Dean Hachamovitch's sneaker taken today at Gnomedex. He's Microsoft Corp. general manager of Longhorn browsing and RSS technologies. After pondering it for several hours now, here's how I will look back on today ...

On June 24, 2005, the users won. The age of RSS innocence ended and a new era "kicked off." RSS graduated from Geek U and is now on its way to turning pro. On June 24, 2015 we will say that this that today RSS was drafted in the first round to play in the big leagues (millions of Windows desktops). It's Hall-of-Fame sibling, HTML, experienced the same right of passage more than 10 years ago. We should be proud of "our" baby.

The news isn't all rosy, however. In the short term, there will be a bit of chaos. The news aggregators, for example, will need to change their business models - perhaps even as I write this. Any RSS aggregator that dreams of competing against Longhorn (e.g. by not supporting it), probably has little chance to win. What they all must do to compete now is innovate on the Longhorn RSS platform. They need to take it farther than what Microsoft gives us next year if they want to succeed wildly.

In addition, what does this mean for the Web - both the desktop and on mobile devices? Where does MSN stand to gain from all of this and what does it mean for folks like Yahoo or Google? Does this mark the return of the desktop's heyday? Hmmm.

Time will answer all of these questions, but what's clear is that RSS - "our" baby - today turned pro. Never will things be the same but that's good for users, be they consumers or businesses, readers or publishers or even advertisers. Today - in the general public's mind - Microsoft kicked off the Web 2.0 era, but expect some short-term turbulence ahead.

Tags: gnomedex gnomedex2005 Longhorn RSS