Newsgator Issues Press Release Regarding Vista/IE7 Launch
Newsgator issued a Press Release today about the paradigm shift that is going to occur due to the release of Vista/IE7. Newsgator founder, Greg Reinacker, says that IE7, “will be the first exposure to RSS and subscriptions for potentially hundreds of millions of people. I believe we’re at the beginning of an Internet paradigm shift. This shift is not about any particular technology, it’s about subscribing to content.”
We who are already RSS junkies might not appreciate how revolutionary this is going to be to many, many people. I talked to two friends today who know how to get around on the internet but neither of them knew what RSS is or what it can do for them.
The paradigm shift Mr. Reinacker talked might affect the ‘junkies’ too. He says that people will no longer look for a subscribe button on a site but for subscription buttons in the applications they use.
When I first started to read this Press Release I thought about FireFox and Safari, but at this point their users are geeks or friends of geeks. Far and away the most widely used browser is Internet Explorer and since Vista is not required for IE7, as soon as people upgrade to it, think of how many people will have their first RSS experience!
It is a pity the RSS experience in IE7 is so poor (the same is true for Firefox RSS handling.) I really doubt anyone new to RSS is going to understand from IE7s UI what just happened when they clicked a feed. That the UI requires an unofficial patch (that you kindly linked to earlier) just to make folders aggregate its contents is crazy.
Then again Google Reader, Bloglines, Rojo et. al. are not that much better for first time users of feeds.
There are going to be a lot of people who get a bad initial impression of RSS.
Hopefully we come up with applications that abstract away the RSS/Atom/RDF bit and help people get the content they want.
Well said, Paul! I’ve played around a bit with the IE7 RSS ’stuff’ and I don’t really like it. I agree that first time users will probably have a bad initial reaction. Although I am a devoted FireFox user, I don’t like their RSS capability either.
Further, I don’t think IE7 will be the watershed RSS event that Microsoft thinks (hopes?) it will be.