ilya haykinson >> blog

There are a few defining technology moments for me. The first was when I saw a computer for the first time (I remember playing Frogger and Moon Patrol). The second was when I got a 486 as an upgrade to a PC XT; I was just not prepared for the speed increase. The next was when around 1995, when I realized that a three-block pedestrian street near me had a website. If a street could have a website, then the future surely had arrived.

I think that I had a fourth defining technology moment the other day. I got my cellphone to stream music from the Net. It’s not a major achievement, but here I was, holding a little box in my hand, receiving more data in a few seconds than I could have fit on any storage device just fifteen years prior. I could go anywhere in my home with this box, and my music — some music — would always be with me. And it’s not really the music that got me — after all, you could do this with radio for decades now. It’s the fact that I really do now have the jukebox-in-the-sky; I can listen to exactly what I want and where I want, without wires and with just my personal helper device. It’s also the fact that it wasn’t just music that was streaming; it was 40 kilobits per second of highly compressed data. I was connected; I was really part of the network. I took this further the next day: I plugged my jukebox-in-the-sky into my car’s auxiliary stereo port. Listening to my streaming station at 70 miles an hour, I was on the Internet, still part of the network.

I was receiving. This was definitely the fourth defining moment for me.

Microsoft’s new version of IE will have RSS feed management based on the new Microsoft Feeds API. This API is also going to be used by the upcoming Office 2007, notably in Outlook.

This is actually a great development. I’ve been a big fan of using mail reader based feedreaders, and totally love the fact that now I don’t have to use third party software. What I’m not happy about is feed synchronization.

I fairly regularly use three computers: a desktop at work, a desktop at home, and a laptop that I bring back and forth. I run Outlook 2007 (beta, of course) on my laptop. However, I sometimes want access to my feeds on one of the other machines, whether because I quickly want to check one of the blogs, or because I find a site that I want to add to my Outlook reading list. But, being on another machine, I’m out of luck.

Outlook makers thought of this, somewhat. Since feeds get delivered into Exchange folders, I can actually just read the posts being retrieved by my laptop from wherever I can run Outlook. But what if I don’t want to run Outlook everywhere?

The solution has got to be feed synchronization. A simple service can receive OPML files containing your blogroll and then synchronize them across Windows devices. Run a small client software, and it keeps track of your feeds — updating any clients with changes from other clients. All your machines would of course start checking all your feeds, but that’s a small cost to pay for keeping your computing environments synchronized.

Requirements for such a service:

1. Create and manage an account
2. Support initial import of an OPML file
3. Configure itself as either a reader only, or full synchronizer
4. Regularly query the service and update the local Common Feed List with new feeds
5. Regularly query the local Common Feed List and upload any changes to the service
6. Support export of OPML file

It would really be best if a service like Bloglines just built an API for this; they already have OPML capabilities and have a feed-savvy account base.

Thoughts, anyone?