In news that certainly is not making the existing RSS Aggregator companies happy, Microsoft Outlook program manager Michael Affronti has soft announced that RSS will be integrated with Outlook 12.
This will not only hurt the NewsGators and Attensas of the RSS space (those that have Outlook plugins to display RSS feeds). It will also impact Bloglines and others as users inevitably move their reading habits to the email client. The ability to drag stories right into subject folders, that may or may not contain emails as well, is just too useful to ignore (and that’s why I liked Yahoo’s integration of RSS with email so much a few weeks ago).
Robert Scoble also wrote about this, and brings up a very important point. Users want RSS in many different ways (mobile, web when they are away from their home computer, etc.). Syncronization is extremely important and this may be the niche that allows existing players to survive.
And I also agree with Robert when he says that RSS integration with Outlook will get millions more people using RSS.
as soon as gmail integrates pim functionality i’ll drop outlook. i dont think there will be a market for email clients 5 years from now. hurrah for webbased email!
I totally agree. We integrated an RSS reader into Webmail.us back in August because email is something that everybody understands - RSS isn’t. We allow our business customers to add required feeds to all of their employees accounts, and each user can also add and categorize their own feeds.
So now the folks that don’t “get it”, and never will “get it”, are now able to use RSS because they understand email.
Drop me an email if you want a free account to check it out.
And we also offer the RSS+email integration with anybody’s third-party email account, as a free service as part of Webmail Lite.
The vendors who sell commercial RSS aggregators aren’t only ones that should be a little concerned.
Anything that Microsoft does that dis-intermediates the user by way of change in client UI is a threat.
For my part, I’ll only switch to a client-side RSS aggregator if it also “talks” to something online that I can get from multiple clients.
Now what would be killer is feed integration with MSN Spaces. Imagine reading feeds in Outlook and on the web, with both clients aware of what has been read and what has not.
We expect and look forward to Outlook 12’s arrival. Aside from the RSS capability there are several other killer features. I can only comment about what Attensa is doing, but we look at RSS in OUtlook (or whereever) as a very, very good thing as our focus is on utilizing attention streams to improve thye user experience. You will see a faceless Attensa app for Outlook 12 to make it work much better.
Ya, sure, after 20 years of this, can’t we just build a universal feed/blog module that auto-generates a time-delayed story regarding Microsoft adopting some new technology or user experience trend? Embrace and replace. Destroy the little people, mop-up the businesses over with over 20 mil in revenue, rinse and repeat. The real story here in this post is what are they going to do to the RSS protocols… remember in ‘96 or so in early Outlook, Word docs were the forced first choice for creating and send e-mail. Nothing’s changed - they will fork with the format or tools one way or the other.
Is RSS that hard to integrate with? I’m sure it takes a software integration cycle, but the beauty of rss is that it is so easy to integrate with software packages. I do not think anyone will get a leg up because of rss. Any type of business model that hinges on RSS will need much more than “reader” functionality to create a defensible position. If someone finds that, I would love to hear it.
oh yeah, merry christmas
test!
great post
What did it for me was Google releasing their free analytics app and probably wiping out not less than a dozen promising startups in a matter of hours.
The little guys are beginning to look more and more like sitting ducks and I don’t like it.
Somebody please hear my call and do a proper, stand alone, sustainable internet business.
Networking: Gigabyte battlefields
Researchers are developing sophisticated networking technologies that enable military commanders to share tactical information — right from the battlefield, in real-time, experts tell United Press International.
As if out of a scene of the TV counter-terrorist drama “24,” the networking software enables commanders to share — or fuse — information from an array of air and ground sensors. This will make the tracking of enemy ground troops, friendly troops and artillery and aircraft easier, experts said. By Gene Koprowski
MS announced a while back they’d integrate RSS all over Vista. Why is anybody surprised about this now?
This also doesn’t mean MS will do the integration right, i.e., innovating rather than copying. They’ll probably leave lots of gaps in functionality that can be filled by enterprising small fries.
After using the Beta of Office 12 for the past month or so, I don’t use the RSS reader built in anymore. It’s not very comfortable to use unfortunately…
They should dedicate an area of Outlook below the to-do bar, that periodically displays stories from RSS feeds you add… Cause right now it’s totally useless.