IE RSS icon - 'we'll follow Mozilla'
The Microsoft RSS team has an update on the RSS icon to be used in future versions of IE. How they came to the decision may surprise some:
"My last post shared some of our conceptual designs of the feed icon and expressed some of the criteria that we are using to select the right icon. Several of the comments liked icon #4 simply because it looked liked the Firefox icon, and many (like this one ) suggested that we work with the Firefox team to standardize on an icon.
This seemed like a very good idea, so in November, Amar and I took a visit down to Silicon Valley to meet with John Lilly and Chris Beard from Mozilla to get their thoughts on it. We all agreed that it’s in the user’s best interest to have one common icon to represent RSS and RSS-related features in a browser. And the winner is…"
Most of the initial reactions to the news seem positive (examples here and here), although there's the odd 'loser' type comment and post too. Oh well, you can't please everyone I suppose.
I love it, the dialogue, that is (I like the icon too). Before I joined Microsoft (over three years ago) this kind of interaction with the Mozilla folks and other web communities (other examples include WASP, Dave Winer) seemed like a pipe dream. Personally speaking, I'm really excited to see this kind of internal transformation happen.
As Sunder puts it "Now we are talking".
The conversations are happening.