It had to happen sooner or later. MyMSN now supports adding RSS or Atom 0.3 feeds as content sources for your home page. RSS/Atom content modules can be customized to show articles from up to 1 day old to up to 365 days old, display from up to 1 article to up to 30 articles and either show article summaries as a tool tip or inline following the article headline. 

Below are screenshots of me testdriving the new features

  1. MyMSN homepage with option to add RSS feeds as content modules
  2. Adding Jeremy Zawodny's Atom feed to my MyMSN homepage
  3. Jeremy Zawodny's Atom feed and Robert Scoble's RSS feed as part of my homepage

In addition the MyMSN folks also provide a handy way to create a link that enables people to add a feed to their MyMSN front page. The following link will add my RSS feed to your MyMSN front page

http://my.msn.com/addtomymsn.armx?id=rss&ut=http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/SyndicationService.asmx/GetRss&ru=http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog

Just as with other Web based aggregators there is also a handy button one can add to a website to enable one-click subscription to your RSS feed. This brings to a grand total of four buttons I need to add to my homepage; Add to MyMSN button, Add to MyYahoo button, Add to Bloglines button, and Add to Newsgator button.

There is also an MSN RSS Directory that contains links to the RSS feeds produced by MSN properties such as MSNBC, MSN Autos and MSN Music.  

I'm really glad to see this ship. When I was first hired onto MSN I was supposed to work with the MyMSN folks on this effort but eventually things changed. Even though I haven't been directly responsible for this feature I've been in touch with the folks driving it and I think it is totally killer that Microsoft has finally officially cast a stone in the XML syndication waters.

Great work all around.


 

Tuesday, January 18, 2005 4:43:17 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Nice! One thing, is the MSN RSS Directory exposed as OPML?
Tuesday, January 18, 2005 6:11:48 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Your newsgator subscription icon in the right hand sidebar seems to point to bloglines.

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