Initial thoughts on IE7 and RSS

There has already been plenty of discussion of the new preview release of IE 7, so I won't try to list everything new. Besides I'm too busy to dig deeply into features that are likely to change before it is released. What I would like to do is list a few clear effects the final release of IE7 will have on RSS and aggregation, most of which are illustrated by this screenshot.

1. "RSS feed" will be contracted to just "feed" in common usage. IE7 uses the term "feed" throughout its interface without mentioning RSS once, as far as I can tell. This makes sense, since "RSS feed" is as redundant as saying "HTML web page." It also means that the public won't have to be aware of the many feed formats, such as Atom, or RDF versus non-RDF RSS.
2. The icon will replace the many variations on RSS and XML icons. IE7 uses the former throughout its interface, so this will rapidly become synonymous with the term feed in the public's mind.
3. Categories will finally be utilized. IE7 lists all of the categories in the currently displayed feed, and allows easy selection of posts via a category. I've done a good amount of research into the use of the category tag in feeds, and it is currently used by surprisingly few blogs.
4. Feed serving bandwidth will go through the roof. IE7 allows automatic updates of feeds and you are reminded of this with every feed you read. Any Windows user knows what its like when Microsoft decides to remind you of something. Let's just say that only the truly anti-establishment will be able to ignore the continual requests to turn on automatic synchronization, and those people will be using Firefox anyway. It seems that turning this feature on automatically sets it for all subscribed feeds. As with any Microsoft software setting, once you turn on synchronization, you have to work real hard to find a way to turn it off. As the screenshot shows, synchronization will continue even when IE7 isn't running. From what I can tell, the default interval is 60 minutes, but this can be changed to a shorter period. I'd tell you how short the interval can be, but I can no longer figure out how to reach this setting in the program. The combination of these factors means that virtually all IE7 users will turn on synchronization of all their feeds and then leave this running whenever their computer is on. Get ready to start paying some serious hosting bills.

Will IE7 kill all the independent aggregation products? The simple answer is yes for any aggregator that just collects feeds and allows you to read posts as they are found in the feed. This is sad, but it also means that aggregator publishers will be forced to innovate at a much greater speed. After all, it's not as if they couldn't see this coming.