By now, unless you’re living under a rock or spent last week trekking through the Khumbu region of Nepal, you’ve probably read that we’re adding RSS support to both Internet Explorer and Longhorn. There’s already been a lot of blah blah blah on it already so I’m not going to waste people’s time here with some long description on whether or not it’s a good or bad thing.

Personally, I feel that having a ‘centralized store’ for your subscription list, downloading of RSS feeds and parsing is a good thing - it will help avoid the problems that I’ve talked about with regards to Windows media libraries.

There’s a big downside though. Now that a relatively simple API will be available to every VB, C# and C++ developer, I’m begging you: Do NOT make 2006 the year of Furrygoat’s Law. Please repeat after me:

1. There’s no reason why my word processor needs to produce and consume RSS feeds.
2. There’s no reason why my paint program needs to produce and consume RSS feeds.
3. There’s no reason why my email program needs to switch to RSS feeds.
4. Calculator applications DO NOT need RSS feeds. Sorry.
5. Most users don’t know what an RSS feed is, nor do they care. They’re still trying to figure out how to get the "12:00" from blinking on the VCR.
6. Granny Smith in Omaha doesn’t need any PDC bling. (sorry, had to say it).

All I’m asking is that people be responsible developers. Just because certain industry pundits say you need to ‘RSS everything’ and spawn the next age of overloaded software, it’s just not true. Frankly, I’m really surprised that MSDN has a section in their RSS overview entitled "How to enable RSS in your application" that contains some pretty half-baked examples. Instead, they should have had a section entitled "Limitations of RSS" that talks about disconnected users, low bandwidth consumption, and that RSS won’t cure world hunger.

Don’t read this the wrong way. As a blog author for the last 5 years, I’ve seen the potential for RSS. Just always remember: With great power, comes great responsibility, my friends. Don’t pull a Rube.