Panel: Future of RSS
One of the fun things I got to do for this year’s PDC was to help organize a panel on “The Future of RSS”. I am sitting in the front row right now.
Summary: great audience interaction. The audience was a mix of people who were relatively new to RSS, people implementing in LOB and ISV apps, and people pushing the edges.
One minute until session start, where is Amar? And Doug? 
Happy days; all the panelists made it. Left to right: Scoble (moderator). Amar Gandhi (MSFT RSS), Jeff Barr (Amazon), Sanaz Ahari (start.com), Greg Reinacker (Newsgator), Mike Ehrenberg (MSFT MBS/CRM), Doug Purdy (MSFT Indigo).
Scoble: What about Auth
Jeff: See Greg’s recent blog post. HTTPS and basic auth work well.
Doug: Talking about how RSS can be an application protocol within SOAP. Solves some SOAP Auth problems.
Greg: No need to wait, though
Scoble: What about expiry?
Greg: Use 410
Sanaz: Encountered scenarios like this in start.com, will support gadgets with expiry.
Scoble: What about large payloads?
Jeff: Bittorrent
Amar: Auth, Bittorrent. Vista uses BITS.
Audience: We wrote a feed about arrival of documents in C++. What are platform pieces availables to someone dynamically generating feeds from data.
Jeff Barr: Do you mean ping protocols?
(clarifies)
Mike: Problem is very similar to what we’re doing in CRM. We have to build ourselves.
Doug: You could use WCF to build it, but no specific feature to support push–>pull mapping. Maybe we should build it. He doesn’t mention the RSS formatter.
Scoble: Greg, is this a sync scenario?
Greg: We sync between agrregators. Planning to sync with Vista platform
Amar: Different meanings of sync.
Audience: In business scenarios of RSS, we care more about being able to track who is using what, filter.
Mike: We track and audit based on authentication. Also filter. User account only goes so far; need roles eventually.
Greg: Newsgator Enterprise uses AD groups
Jeff Barr: Public perception is that RSS is public, blogs, but there are 10s of thousands of intranet feeds.
Sanaz: Feeds have ads, but advertisers worry about losing tracking information. However, you get other benefits from using RSS; know what topics the readers are interested in, etc.
Audience: Tell me more about auth with externals and roles?
Mike: Using local copy of AD is not good; you need to share auth roles with the partner. Federated security is promising.
Doug: Federated security.
Umbraco: Don’t necessarily need the “perfect” solution. Some of the problems are social.
Audience: KISS. If you keep extending RSS, at what point does it become just another XML protocol.
Amar: It’s a vocabulary for representing data items; that seems a good place to keep it.
Doug: Agreed. As soon as you start introducing infrastructure notions, you’ve gone too far. Again mentions embedding RSS in SOAP a couple of times.
Audience: I’m evangelizing blogging in Intel. When people ask me about auth, I just ask “what are you doing today?” It’s often a solved problem.
Audience: Can RSS solve phishing and scamming problems.
Doug: Replace e-mail with RSS?
Scoble: For some corporate scenarios, it will
Jeff: RSS is the ultimate opt-in.
Greg: There is work being done on identity verification of feeds.
Doug: Could use XML DSIG. Or use SSL and sign with certificate.
Audience: As you introduce extensions, does this replace RDF? Do you need to handle schema for extensions?
Amar: Talking about microformats with technorati, simple extensions and the social feedback loop. If you get into ontologies and taxonomy, it’s squishy.
Audience: What about overlapping results?
Scoble: Sites publish the same feed in multiple formats.
Jeff: There is a way to do unique ID per article, but few people use it. Makes it complicated. People use notepad to write RSS. Hard to force people to implement.
Doug: We’ll never get rid of uuidgen.
Scoble: Updates show as dups, can you fix that Greg?
Greg: Upgrade to the latest build. People should use guids, though, because it works better.
Audience: I want to run Outlook rules on RSS items to kick off workflow. Can I do this?
No obvious answer for Newsgator or Outlook 12. Maybe use
Todd Bishop from Seattle-PI: How does Outlook aggregator affect Newsgator.
Greg: RSS everywhere increases the market for RSS, which is good for us. Outlook aggregator is just one product. NG enterprise integrates with Exchange, which is key for enterprises who want to get outlook web access as well. Go to newgator.com and win a laptop.
Scoble: Outlook team used C++, and Newsgator used .NET, so will be more productive
Audience: What do you think about the people ramming large image ads, etc. into feeds?
Scoble: Have to incentivize content producers, so you can’t get rid of ads completely. But there are tasteful ways to do it.
Sanaz: If it drives users away, the advertisers lose. So they have to find the right balance anyway.
Audience: Feed subscription demonstrates interest, attention
Audience: What is product roadmap for implementing media enclosure support across MSFT product line.
Amar: RSS platform supports it nicely. Pushing product groups to do that. No specific disclosures at this point.
Scoble: What about richer interactivity? 2-way?
Amar: I’d like to answer a different question. RSS will become a target as it becomes more popular. Need to design with this in mind. Platform can do some things, but aggregators need to sandbox.
Jeff: Security is a now problem; we already have attacks
Sanaz: I’d like to answer the original question. Start.com is enabling this very scenario. Gadgets to enable special viewers for different types of RSS. Cross gadget communication.
Audience: MSFT recommends medium trust for ASP.NET; breaks ASP.NET apps that access arbitrary RSS.
Doug: Good point; that’s System.Net blocking you, could break web services too.
Audience: What about using RSS for sending expression trees, etc.
Doug: Sure, it could be done
Jeff: Just don’t send around actual code
Doug: Agreed
Audience: How do we trust you not to screw up RSS, if you tried to buy Claria?
Scoble: The right decision was made.
Audience: What about bandwidth?
Greg: Compression, filter for device capabilities
Jeff: Compression
Doug: Several ways to handle at trasport layer
Scoble: Feed should give history, so subscribers know what to expect
Greg: Auto-download is not always ideal user experience. We changed all of our prompts.
Audience: You start using for business data, expression trees, etc. when is it no longer RSS?
Jeff: Test it in some popular aggregators. If it makes sense to a normal user, it’s RSS.
Scoble: It’s about passing around data intended for human consumption.