Is Microsoft Serious About RSS?

If you answer no, take a look at their beta RSS Aggregator. Click on “show.” Have fun. Unless you are a web-based aggregator vendor, then you can shriek in terror.

Note the following features:

Snappy Ajax interface
Ease of adding RSS Feeds (they don’t have to be cached)
Neat organization of My Feeds, Recent Searches
Collapse All / Expand all RSS Feeds
Directory style navigation with subscribe-able sub-directories
And most of all, the best UI of any web based aggregator – by far!

I am reminded of the early days of Outlook when Microsoft went from worst to first in email in a matter of quarters.

Bet Bloglines is happy they sold.
And if Yahoo reinventing their company around RSS why can’t they do this?
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Update to original post. Less than 24 hours later, they took it down. [Insert your own conspiracy theory here]. Richard McManus has screen shots.