Niall Kennedy, Feed Platforms, and Services

I, for one, am very excited to have Niall Kennedy join the Windows Live team and drive the development of an RSS platform.

For one thing, it's great to have someone with a voice that is as well-respected as his joining Microsoft in any capacity. Just last month, at Etech, Jane Kim joined Niall onstage for his session on Feeds as a platform, where she talked about the principles behind why we are building a shared central platform for feed syndication into Windows. It was clear then (and from his excellent writeups on the topic) that he deeply understood the value of feed platforms.

More generally, it is great to have Windows Live focusing on building an online RSS platform. I have long believed that integration between online services and clients enables far richer experiences than either one alone (in fact, a key goal of our own Windows RSS platform is to make it super-easy for a client developer to integrate online content and services into their application). 

On a related topic, I will go out on a limb and say that I can be a bit of a NewsGator fanboy. I've been a NewsGator Outlook Edition Inbox user for years (though these days, I admit, I feel compelled to use IE7's feed reader :) The synchronization support between the RSS platform and NewsGator Online that Greg showed off at Mix06 is just awesome. Greg and the NewsGator team demonstrate exactly what I love about integration between clients and services combining to deliver a great service that makes them both that much better.

In short, there is no end to the cool things that services enable, both the Windows Live ones and the ones done by folks like Greg and his team.

Sean