Live blogging Dean Hachamovitch at Gnomedex – GM IE

(again, sort of pre-recorded as my blog was down)

Dean is here announcing all the cool Longhorn and IE7 changes around RSS

Mentioned Steve Rubel – btw where is Rubel? Want to meet him, after he gave me my Gmail account after all.

 

Now that was funny – Death Star crack . Off to a nice start making cracks on MS, self-deprecating. Crowd appreciates it.

 

Slideware moment – I do like the minimalist approach Dean’s using. White text, black background. Ahh…it’s part of the branding their using on their t-shirts.

 

(still updating my damn blog…almost live again)

 

Talking about how subscription is powerful.

 

Previewing Longhorn. Woah, big icons. Must be resolution choice for the demo.

Now on to IE7

Subscribe button (”plus” icon) – this is the point. The user should NOT need to know or care that it is RSS, Atom, or whatever. It’s about “subscribe”

 

I actually don’t like how Dean is using a demo guy. A GM in charge of IE should be able to demo IE7 to a small group. IMO of course.

 

You can tell this crowd is seething with skeptics.

 

Cool – rss feeds embedded in MSN Search (I think). Talking about an “RSS platform” in LH.

 

Dare just stood up. Damn, he’s a big kid. :) Showing off RSS Bandit (nice) – cool how an open sourced hobby by an FTE is getting playtime in an official MS demo.

 

Marc Canter chimed in – what if there is more than one feed in a page? Good Q. Kind of answered by saying things will change in LH.

 

“you’re like a friendly borg” –> audience comment. Sweet.

 

Demo’ing some calendaring stuff – audience just shot in with “you should use iCal!” <much laughter>

Doing this too much in our normal “got to demo it” instead of just opening up to fluid Q&A. Getting a bit weird and hostile here – just RIPPED on an audience member. Everyone else laughed, I’m not sure the target took it too well.

 

Talking about getting calendar info into RSS feed. Canter asking “why not use namespace”, Winer chimed back with “because RSS does that already”. Wow, I’m not technical. No real idea or interest in what they’re talking about. no idea if I even captured those comments right.

 

This is kind of painful, just waiting for the next awkward moment. Awesome that the IE team is here in the line of fire though. Love that. Nice work.

 

Now this is the interesting stuff – ordered list extension to RSS (like best seller lists, instead of just chronological, more defined data). Let’s see how this one goes down with the audience. Demo’ing Amazon wish list now. Showing user filtering.

 

Making the list extensions available under Creative Commons license. VERY COOL. Video endorsement by Larry Lessig. Again, VERY COOL. Well received.

 

Some guy just ripped on MS, and ripped on RSS 2.0 in the same breadth. Not received well (RSS part at least).

 

Wow…Keith Teare (ex of Realnames) just chimed in with a comment, right behind me. Why wow? 7 years ago he was a sales client of mine when I was pitching Convoy Cluster Software (now NLB). Blast from the past, I’ll have to intro myself.

 

Steve Rubel just called all this “embrace and extend lite”. Ouch. “Give me evidence that the Death Star is gone and has exploded, and that we are living under Jedi rule.” There is palpable concern in this audience about MSFT – how genuine are they being? Is this another play to force the whole world to adapt to their “standards”?

 

The guy in front of me just went out and registered the domain “simplelistextensions.org” in order to lay claim to setting up a community around this it seems. What a fast land grab.