Posts tagged as: ie7

IE7's aggregator isn't impressive, but it is good enough

Trying to recharacterize a quote once it is loose in the blogosphere can be a tricky business. In my initial thoughts on IE7 I wrote that it would likely kill many RSS aggregators that did little more than let you read feeds. Richard MacManus linked to this and wrote "Adam Green thinks IE7 will kill a lot of independent RSS Aggregator products, due to IE7's impressive RSS integration features." The first clause was mine, but the second clause wasn't. I don't fault Richard. He was using me as an example to prove his point, but I don't want to leave the impression active that I think IE7's use of RSS is impressive. In fact, it is just the opposite. IE7 is a very weak aggregator, but it will still drive out the other independent aggregators, because it will be part of IE.

Microsoft long ago mastered the trick of calculating exactly the minimal feature set needed to suck the air out of a market it wants to enter. They do about half of this the first time around, and eventually reach the minimal set by about the third version. Then they stop completely. This is the thing I hate the most about Microsoft's monopoly over the software market. Take a look at Excel and Word. They are basically frozen with a feature set that is over 10 to 15 years old. Microsoft knows that people aren't willing to go through the bother of switching products if most of their needs are met. More features beyond the minimal set means more bugs, so Microsoft has nothing to gain once a market is theirs. The result is a stifling of innovation. It was just this stifling that led so many in the software industry to flee to the Internet in the mid-Nineties.

My favorite example of the Microsoft effect is the graphing in Excel. It absolutely sucks. I have been using it for years, and I still have no idea how to create what I want. Each time I use it I just keep whacking away at it until I get close to what I want, and then I stop. Once when my son was creating some complex graphs for a science project, I went to some download sites and got a few shareware graphing packages. He was amazed by their power and ease of use. He asked why Microsoft didn't do graphs this well, and my answer was "Because they don't have to." I then explained my theory of the Microsoft effect. (Yes, having me as a father can be a bit tedious. My kids usually know better than to ask my opinion on software. My wife won't even stay in the room when software comes up.)

So does this mean that we are doomed to a life of mediocre aggregators when IE7 wins? I am afraid so, but I hope not. What I really hope is that Scott Karp's vision will be realized: "The New Media revolution will come when content is completely atomized and fully tagged, so that it can be remixed into perfectly tailored packages to suit every taste, i.e. truly what I want (when I want it)." But the aggregator publishers have to move fast. Once IE7 is cleaned up enough to release, it will shut down much of the opportunities to find new users. That doesn't mean that the average user is lazy or stupid. It means that they have a life, and seeking out the ultimate aggregator won't be a high priority for them.

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.