InsideMicrosoft

MSN Working On RSS Aggregator

MSN is building an RSS aggregator. It doesn’t do much at the moment, but you can take a look at it and guess at the possibilities. You can add feeds (if you put in a URL, it finds the feed for you without giving you options to choose). The page can’t seem to decide if you get excerpts or full text (my site gets excerpts, Engadget gets full text), and you can’t choose for yourself. You can’t categorize feeds or put them under custom tabs. It chokes on wide posts or thin browsers. You can’t share a blogroll. It doesn’t notify you of new posts.

I’m not saying its bad. It just happens to be the very definition of a work in progress. Lets say it eventually adds all the features I complained about, and moves feeds to a sidebar (like Bloglines). Would I love it? Of course! The damn thing runs like Gmail, loading nicely, all in a tight interface (except for the tabs, don’t like those). If MSN keeps working to improve this (it has no name), I’ll be very pleased. Just don’t expect that for several months, minimum.

Now, where do you get this site? Well, for the moment it is at start.com/1/. Meanwhile, there’s also start.com/2/, which can automatically import your IE bookmarks (but not your MSN bookmarks!). So, at 1 you get an RSS reader, and at 2 you get bookmarks you can access from any computer. Not a terrible idea. Start.com might become something cool.

Talking about Start:
Google Blogoscoped
ReadWriteWeb
SiliconBeat
ThreadWatch
Steve Rubel
Dave Winer

UPDATE: It now works in Firefox (via Omar Shahine)

March 10th, 2005 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | MSN, General | 2 comments