Microsoft chooses RSS icon for Microsoft new operating system

Microsoft has chosen an RSS icon to be used in Microsoft’s new operating system, Vista. When you browse to a Web or blog page syndicating its content via RSS you’ll see that little orange icon on IE. When you click on the icon, you will be prompted to add the site’s or blog’s feeds to your aggregator. Looks just the icon we see on our Firefox browser.

The Microsoft Team RSS Blog provided this explanation for the choice.

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.

Looks to me like Microsoft’s goal is to eliminate the name RSS or XML and replace it with the term ‘feed.’ The Mozilla explanation is a nice one but why not use RSS or XML squares when they are used by The New York Times, Yahoo, BBC, CNN and other major Internet content providers with their RSS feeds.

Could it be that Microsoft wants to get everyone to confirm to the Microsoft RSS way? Maybe not. But with Microsoft’s history people will question what they are doing.

Source of post: Alex Barnett blog