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May 14, 2005

Online RSS Feed Reader from Microsoft?

Now Microsoft is getting RSSy. Whew. Once of their recent blog entries pointed me to Start.com, or more specifically http://www.start.com/1/. The disclaimer at the bottom of the first page states, "This site is not an officially supported site. It is an incubation experiment and doesn't represent any particular strategy or policy."

It looks like a standard MSN search until you click on the "show" link over on the left. The show link expands an interface to read RSS feeds. The feeds are divided up over several tabs, including business, entertainment, news (hey, Yahoo News is at the top), and health.

The RSS feeds are on the left. Click on one and the latest stories show up on the right. You can expand and collapse the entries individually in the content box. You can list fewer or more entries in the content box -- nice if you've missed a couple weeks' worth of content.

You can add your own feeds as well, either importing an OPML file, or adding feeds individually. Your information is saved via cookie or you can get a specialized URL which will work from any computer and contain your saved configuration (ala Google News customization.)

There are a couple things I don't like about this. If you want to view the site it opens a new window. I'd like the option to either do that or not. Second thing I don't like is I don't have a clear sense of how many items are available in a feed. I used the "more items" feature to expand out Scobleizer's feed listing tremendously and I still have no idea where the bottom of it is.

Posted to Internet-Technology-RSS | TrackBack


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