A screencast about common feeds in Vista

I caught this from James Govenor over at Redmonk. It is very timely given my recent post on the divergence between how feed support is implemented in Outlook versus IE7. In this case, the discrepancies are illustrated in Vista, courtesy of a screencast by Jon Udell.   

Today’s 4-minute screencast, which explores Vista’s common feed system, serves multiple purposes. First, I wanted to familiarize myself with this stuff, and do so in a way that would elicit responses that help me understand how other folks are reacting to it. I am intensely interested in the reasons why people do or don’t take to the notion of reading RSS feeds. Mostly, as we know, they haven’t.

Source: Jon Udell

As XML syndication via RSS and Atom become more prevalent behind the firewall, I don't believe there will be a single user experience ("just" Outlook or "just IE"). Having a common set of services on the desktop via Windows RSS Platform was a very thoughtful approach by Microsoft. It provides for common policy enforcement (to deal with virus and other malware issues), a consistent application integration model, as well as a common management point (for feed management, cross-device synchronization, de-duping, coordinating read/unread marks, network management). It's also important to have a consistent user experience (the screencast shows both subtle and significant differences between IE and Outlook that can confuse users). It's unfortunate that Microsoft is starting off with such a design and implementation disconnect between its own products.