RSS is Coming On Strong–Choose Your News Sources

Steve Ballmer is a rich man and knows what is coming down the pike from Microsoft.
He spoke at an industry event and predicted great things for RSS feeds.

“While feedreading has been more embraced by those who work and use technology very frequently in their lives, Microsoft should be the engine to drive RSS to greater adoption.” He thinks that the tipping point will come and it will bye bye email newsletters, hello feeds.

RSS offers an opt-in model to receiving content that places much greater control of the flow of information. While legitimate firms that use email for communication do enable people to unsubscribe from an email list, sometimes those email lists find their way into other hands.

And not everyone is equally as effective, or even concerned with allowing people to easily dump those email subscriptions. Of course, unwanted junk mail plagues millions of users with email accounts.

RSS does not have a spam problem. And if a RSS feed publisher suddenly became aggressive in filling a subscriber’s feedreader with junk, a simple click is usually all it takes to remove that feed from the reader.

“Users are far more selective about where they want to see advertising online than offline, but users are also more willing to sign up and say I’ll subscribe to things that are important to me,” Ballmer said in noting how Microsoft will build the platform that enables RSS in Windows.