Danny Sullivan, one of the guys behind the popular Search Engine Watch blog has written a blog post about his RSS reader of choice. The post is entitled Reading Feeds With RSS Bandit and begins

Dave Naylor and I were IMing today about IE 7's new RSS feature. He was very excited. I haven't tried it yet, but the screenshot he sent me didn't make me think it was better than the RSS Bandit feed reader I currently use. I've been meaning to write about that anyway, so this gave me an excuse.

Let me preface this by saying that everyone seems a bit different on how they read feeds. Some do it for pleasure, and they aren't worried about missing something, in the same way they might not worry if they missed a day or two of reading the newspaper. Others read for work and maybe manage a ton of feeds (that's me). Others seem to want to read one feed at a time, something I've seen some people describe as "wrong" or "stupid."

My feeling is that there is no "right" way to read feeds. Anyone who tells you that is the stupid one. What's the "right" way to read a newspaper or watch TV. Can you start with Business and then read the main news sections. Do you need to watch each program from beginning to end or is flipping allowed?

Read feeds however you want. What is helpful is to hear about how others do, because you can pick up tips or ideas on how you might improve your own reading.

I'm going to explain how I've shifted in my own reading. I hope some find that useful, but like I said, I'm not saying this is the "right" way to read nor that I use the "right" tool that everyone should use. It just what works for me.

Danny goes on to talk about the various ways one could choose to use RSS Bandit from treating it like a mail reader and viewing posts one by one as new items show up in each feed to consuming them in the "river of news" style by always reading the "Unread Items" folder. In building RSS Bandit we've tried to make it flexible so it can be adapted to multiple reading habits since as Danny says in his post there is no "right" way to read feeds. Different people find different approaches more suited to their needs. 

One thing Danny suggested which I haven't commented on before in my blog is the ability to organize feeds according to tags. I've thought about this a little over the past few weeks, specifically I've been comparing the user experience of Windows Live Favorites which is folder based with that of del.icio.us and Bookmarks in the Google Toolbar which are both tag based. One thing that seems clear is that it would be difficult to mix and atch (i.e. merge) both models. We'd probably have to let users switch between a traditional folder view which would use the current tree control and a tag view which would use a control similar to Eyefinder which mimics the Outlook 2003 user interface. Of course, this assumes that the main benefit of the tag view is so people can have feeds show up in multiple 'folders'. If people want other tag-based user interface features such as tag clouds then that would be problematic to implement as a Windows user interface component but may work as a newspaper view that is tied to the tag-based view.

The more I think about it the more I think there is definitely room for experimentation here. Now if only I could find some free time to experiment with some of these ideas. :)

A few days ago, in my blog post entitled Some Thoughts on the IE 7 Beta 2 Preview release I described the RSS features of IE 7 as unsatisfactory and disappointing. It seems I'm not the only one who dislikes what the Internet Explorer team has done with RSS.

In his post RSS Is a Glorified "Favorites" Feature Scott Karp writes

RSS is in Internet Explorer 7!!! The blogosphere is shouting from the rooftops. Yawn. I tried RSS in IE7, and it highlights the true shortcoming of current RSS applications — it’s really not much of an improvement over “favorites” or “bookmarks.”

IE7 goes so far as to put the RSS reader in same menu as favorites (or as TDavid puts it “A separate “Feed Center” exists inside the Favorites area.”), which appears in a left-hand navigation column.

So what’s the real innovation over Favorites/Bookmarks in terms of user experience? That it “automatically updates”? That I can get everything all in one place? That it highlights what’s new?

In his post RSS Really Sucks Paul Kedrosky writes

A while back I wrote that RSS sucks, and now that I've had some more time to think about it I've come to a deeper and more nuanced conclusion: RSS Really Sucks. The point was driven home recently as I read articles by people arguing that IE7 from Microsoft does RSS well enough to kill off a few standalone aggregators. I suppose, although that's a little like saying that buggy whips drive milk-wagons so well that people will soon stop using willow branches to goad horses.

Why? Because, as Scott Karp points out, the IE7 RSS implementation is as glorified "favorites" -- bookmarks, in other words. And they are particularly irritating bookmarks, ones that continually change and needle you as more "information" (I use that advisedly) comes beeping and streaming into your computer.

The main reason I am so irritated by IE 7's lackluster user experience around RSS is that you only get one chance to make a first impression. Using IE 7 will be the first time millions of people will be introduced to RSS and it would be unfortunate if they come away from thinking that is potentially transformative and liberating technology is simply a kind of "bookmarks that nag you all the time" feature.

I've heard some people say that if Microsoft integrates a high quality RSS reader into the browser then it would kill the desktop aggregator market which is the kind of thing Microsoft gets in legal trouble for all the time. My response? That is Death by Risk Aversion. What matters is making end users happy, not worrying about making features that suck just enough that people have to go out and buy software that does the job well so we don't get in legal trouble. 

One of the things I have learned about shipping software is that no matter how much work you put in beforehand, you're going to have to make some changes (fix bugs, tweak code, etc) after your software is actually in the hands of end users. Last week's update to MSN Spaces was no different.

Mike Torres talks about some of these changes in his post Some updates (and a new feature!) where he writes

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We updated some things today; every one of those things was based on direct feedback from you guys.

 

I want to comment on just a few things quickly...

• We have a new feature: the Windows Live Favorites Beta module.  OK, OK.  I know what you're thinking... "Didn't you guys just release a bunch of new features last week?"  Yes...  Yes, we did.  But we wanted to use this opportunity to introduce yet another cool new and exciting feature.  Don't know what Live Favorites is all about?  Check it out here - and then add the module to your space to share your bookmarks with your friends... or the world!  Bill has a complete overview on his space.
• Links in the RSS feeds didn't point to the actual entry, it pointed to the blog page and now it points to the entry like it should have.  Hence everything is probably unread again in your RSS reader :(  But, it's FIXED for good! So if you were wondering what's up, that's what was up.
• Overall performance and stability improvements.

And the kicker...

• Comment ordering is back to the way it was before.  Thanks for all the feedback; I really didn't like it either.  When you're used to something, sometimes it's just better not to touch the thing.  Of course, there will be people who don't like it the "old" way either!  But that's a risk we're willing to take at this point to make sure the other 99% of you are happy again.  Thanks Eileen, Tony, Becky, and others who made this happen :)

There were also about a dozen or more fixes here and there...

What about Photos?  We're also working on some simply outstanding stuff here... but this work will take some more time.  Rest assured, we hear you loud and clear about Photos.  So we think you'll really like what's coming up!

---

One of the reasons I like Web-based software is that we can ship bug fixes to our users quickly without having them deal with installing patches, updates or downloading new installers as is the case with desktop software. I love the Web!!!

PS: Mike is right that there are some cool improvements to photos being planned for the MSN Spaces service.

In his post Thanks Bloglines Mike Torres writes

Over the course of the last few days, we noticed a problem in the way Bloglines was displaying feeds from MSN Spaces.  This problem was due to our recent URL change and the way we're redirecting visitors from http://spaces.msn.com/members/mike (as an example) to http://spaces.msn.com/mike.  Instead of providing the absolute URL to the RSS feed when Bloglines and others requested the feed, we're only returning the relative URL (i.e. "/mike").

 

Because of this, Bloglines had to turn around a fix to support relative URL redirects in record time.  Within just a couple of hours of contacting them, they had diagnosed the issue, fixed up all the Spaces feeds in their entire system, and patched the redirect logic to make sure it wouldn't happen again.  During this time, the subscriber lists/counts associated with a feed weren't updated for a little while (my 362 subscribers showed as 9, but my ego wasn't bruised) and they even did the extra work to merge "new" feeds with "old" feeds (because when the feed broke, and someone subscribed to the correct feed, Bloglines then had two records for the 'same' feed).

 

In short, this was truly great work by Mark Fletcher and the Bloglines staff.  Sorry guys for keeping you up so late on a Tuesday night!  We'll be making a change to the way we redirect shortly just to make sure this won't be a problem for anyone else in the future.  And for you Bloglines users, you should be back to normal for any MSN Spaces feeds in your list!

Mike and I exchanged mail with Mark Fletcher about this issue on Tuesday, and as he writes we were both grateful and impressed at how quickly the Bloglines folks made changes to fix the consequences of a bug in how we were sending HTTP redirects. Mad props to Mark Fletcher and the folks at Bloglines. You guys definitely rock.

In a recent post on the RSS Bandit forums entitled Microsoft Feeds API, one of our users asked when we plan to take addvantage of the Windows RSS Platform. Specifically the question asked was

I downloaded IE7 beta 2 preview and one of the new features is feed support. There really is no comparison between RSS Bandit and the minimilist support IE7 provideds however it is my understanding that there is more to the feed support then the basic UI IE provides. Apparently the Feed API is highly integrated into Vista and has been backported to XP as part of IE7. I would like to suggest (and I have no idea if this is even possible) that RSS Bandit embrace this new API. It's in it's early stages and I'd like to see it mature with the help of RSS Bandit into a usable common feed store for any number of apps (RSS Bandit, IE, plus anything else that decides to use it like the sample screensaver app in the API documentation.) Perhaps that's asking too much but I figured I should at least put the idea out there. It would be really great if, while surfing the net in IE I could subscribe to rss feeds using the IE mechanism, maybe take a quick look through them in IE, then later go back in RSS Bandit and be able to use the much more powerful features (such as stored searches, and folder aggregation) without having to have two copies of my actual feed lists to maintain.

Here's a link to the only info I could find on it so far:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/FeedsAPI/rss/rss_entry.asp

To the various people who have asked this question [including my friends on the IE team], the answer is YES we will support the Windows RSS Platform. As Walter, wrote in his post on Windows RSS Platform there are 3 main components of the platform; the Common Feed List, Feed Synchronization Engine, and Feed Store. Ideally I'd like to use all 3 in RSS Bandit but suspect that it'll be difficult to switch to using the Feed Synchronization Engine or the Feed Store provided by the Windows RSS platform. For example, our feed synchronization engine supports subscribing to USENET newsgroups which I doubt the Feed Syncrhonization Engine in the Windows RSS platform supports. On the other hand, it should be straightforward to satisfy the scenario requested in the quoted post where items subscribed in IE 7 are reflected in RSS Bandit and vice versa.

I need to work out the user interface with Torsten but it should be easy for us to support the Common Feed List. My current thinking is that we'll have a special folder for "My Internet Explorer Subscriptions" as opposed to mirroring the entire feed list in RSS Bandit within IE 7 and vice versa. Thoughts?

It seems like I'm not the only person underwhelmed by the recent Internet Explorer 7 beta release. Alex Russell, one of the guys behind the brilliant Dojo Toolkit, has a blog post entitled How IE7 Can Avoid Irrelevance which lists a number of places where Internet Explorer is deficient when it comes to DHTML/AJAX development. He writes

At a minimum, dynamic web apps need the following out of IE and JScript in the very near future:

• Memory leaks need to simply disappear
• Fix the cache+gzip bugs
• Give us getters/setters in JScript or give back watch()
• Fix the event object. Pass it in to DOM handlers by default. Also, offsetLeft and offsetTop are so ambiguious as to be useless. Give us currentTarget.
• Bump the limit on the number of concurrent HTTP connections if those connections are initiated after onload (either via XMLHTTP or other methods)
• Today, allocating more than 5K objects or so brings JScript to its knees. Object allocation cost needs to be O(1)
• Either revive (and start to fix) VML or give it an SVG-Tiny+DOM facade
• Give us a persistent, string-keyed, local cache in the MB range (5-10MB/domain seems a good start)
• Fast DOM queries. CSS selectors or XPath, we don’t care. Just give us a way to say “get us all DOM node objects matching this”
• A way to toggle the box model on a per-element basis without switching doctypes. The CSS 3 box model spec seems a good starting point

If Microsoft is to re-build any credibility around their browser, they need to show us the goods. CSS fixes won’t suffice this time around.

This is a pretty good list and it contains a lot of the features Jon Udell mentioned that he would like to see in future versions of Internet Explorer in his post Further adventures in lightweight service composition . The only thing I'd change about Alex's post would be to rename it How IE8 Can Avoid Irrelevance. I've worked at Microsoft long enough to know that by the time a product hits beta 2, the only kind of changes you are going to see are fixes to major [as in crashing] bugs, security fixes and low cost cosmetic changes. I can only hope that it doesn't take us another five years to see the next version of Internet Explorer

On the positive side, it looks like Dean Hachamovitch who runs the IE team not only has read Alex's blog post but posted a response . That's a good start. .

Ken Levy has a blog post entitled From product manager to product planner where he writes

After working as a product manager in the developer division for the past 4.5 years, I've decided to accept an offer to work in a new position at Microsoft. Starting in March, I will be a product planner working on developer community efforts in a new group within the Windows Live division.

I'll definitely miss the regular interaction with VFP team members and the great Visual FoxPro community. I've also had great experiences working with the WebData XML team on the XML tools story for Visual Studio 2005, doing some community work with the VB team, and helping with content for Channel 9 both in front of and behind the camera. I expect to continue to do interviews and be interviewed for Channel 9 from time to time ongoing since it is such a great site for community efforts and transparency.
...
I can't say much about my new role just yet. To get an idea of just some of the developer centric things I'll be working on in the Windows Live team, check out the recent 21 minute video by Robert Scoble on Channel 9 interviewing my new manager, Windows Live group product planner Scott Swanson...MSN Messenger APIs

Given that I was one of the folks who pitched Ken on coming over to work on the developer platform activities in Windows Live, I'm glad to see him come over. When I was on the WebData XML team I saw Ken do great work in evangelizing the XML tools we built for Visual Studio 2005. I can't wait to see what he does for the various APIs we plan to develop around Windows Live.

The Associated Press has an article entitled Microsoft Changes Blog Shutdown Policies which states

SEATTLE - Microsoft Corp. is tightening its policies regarding shutting down Web journals after its much-publicized shut down of a well-known Chinese blogger at that government's request.

The Redmond software company, which operates a popular blogging technology called MSN Spaces, said Tuesday that the changes will include efforts to make the banned content available to users elsewhere in the world even if Microsoft decides it has a legal duty to block it in a particular country.

The company also pledged to provide users with a clear notice that it has shut down a Web site because it received a legally binding notice that the material violates local laws. Previously, it has simply said the content was unavailable.

Brad Smith, Microsoft's top lawyer, said in an interview that it will depend on the circumstances of the shutdown as to whether the new policy means that an archive of the blog will remain available elsewhere, or that the Web blog's author will be able to continue posting information to users outside the country that ordered the blockage.

"Some of this, I think, we just have to recognize is evolving technology and changing law," said Smith, speaking by phone from a Microsoft-sponsored government conference in Lisbon, Portugal.

MSN Spaces, which allows users to post journals, pictures and other content on the Internet, boasts 35 million users, including 3.3 million in China.

The company has maintained that it is important to be able to provide users in other countries with such tools, even as it insists it is bound by local laws when it operates in those places.

"We think that blogging and similar tools are powerful vehicles for economic development and for creativity and free expression. They are tools that do good," Smith said. "We believe that it's better to make these tools available than not, but that isn't the end of the discussion, either."

This is good to hear. You can also get the news straight from the horses mouth from the press release Microsoft Outlines Policy Framework for Dealing with Government Restrictions on Blog Content.

If you are a regular reader of the Internet Explorer team's blog then you should know that IE7 Beta 2 Preview is now available.

I've used it for about 10 minutes now and I'm still having difficulty getting used to the changes in the user interface. They seem like rather gratuitous changes to me, the browser now seems unfamiliar although I assume that I'll eventually get used to the new look and feel.  My main interest was in checking out the RSS support in the browser and so far I've been unsatisfied by the experience. Below is a screenshot of what it looks like when subscribed to a feed. 

The general RSS reading experience is rather unsatisfactory. There are so many features I take for granted from using RSS Bandit that I find the RSS experience in IE 7 to be disappointing. No search folders, no aggregated views of items within a category, no ability to flag items, no options to email an item or post it to my favorite social bookmarking site.  I couldn't even figure out how to mark individual items as read or unread. I found it to be pretty unusable as a replacement for my current RSS reader. 

From the official Google Blog we find the post All buttoned up which informs us that

As the Google Toolbar has gotten more popular, the greatest source of ideas about new features has come from our users. The breadth and variety of these requests is so large that it's hard to satisfy everyone. But then we started noticing engineers on the team had cool hacks on their Toolbars for doing customized searches on our internal bugs database, corporate employee directory, etc... We were barely done asking ourselves whether it was possible to offer this capability in the new Google Toolbar beta when one of the engineers started designing a feature called Custom Buttons. Here are some of the coolest aspects of Custom Buttons and why I think they're a big deal:

1) Simple API: The term API is almost a misnomer -- it literally takes seconds to make one of these. I just can't resist the urge to make a new one every time I run into new website. A couple of simple steps and voila - a new button's sitting on your Toolbar (check out the Getting Started Guide).

2) Flexibility: The simple inclusion of RSS & Atom feeds (and particularly allowing the update of toolbar button icons through feeds) has allowed for buttons like a weather button and a mood ring button.

3) Accessibility: Most users don't even need to make buttons. It takes one click on our buttons gallery or on a website that offers them to install a button for your favorite sites. And the custom buttons we built to search our intranet showed us how valuable a customizable toolbar can be to organizations, so now there's an enterprise version of Google Toolbar that can be securely deployed across a company.

I use the Google toolbar quite frequently when performing searches and one of my biggest gripes is that it doesn't give me the option of using Google Music Search for my searches. So when I found out about the new version of the toolbar, I downloaded it out and clicked on "Add Search Type" which took me to the Google Toolbar Button Gallery. Guess what? There's no option for adding Google Music Search to my list of default search types.

So I tried reading the documentation on Getting Started with the Google Toolbar API so I could figure out how to add it myself and came up short.  The entire API seems to assume that some stuff gets installed in my right-click menu in Internet Explorer which doesn't seem to be the case. I wonder if I need to reboot to get the changes to show up? Bah. Now I feel irritated that I just wasted 15 minutes of my time on this.