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At a conference in Seattle yesterday, Microsoft officials announced that Longhorn, its next operating system will come with RSS-friendly features making it easy for users to subscribe to them, and for developers to work with them.

Longhorn is scheduled to come out next year, and its new RSS features are expected to bring the common internet user closer to the technology and make it more popular.

"We want RSS everywhere," Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch said. "RSS is so powerful I want it in more than just the browser and the aggregator. I want it everywhere." Kim Peterson with the Seattle Times reports:

Only about 6 million Americans - 5 percent of the country's online population - subscribe to RSS feeds, according to a January survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a nonprofit group that studies the impact of the Internet.

But most attendees at the conference, called Gnomedex, were fully convinced of the technology's promise. Microsoft was enamored enough to tweak its operating system, code-named Longhorn, to make the underlying structure of RSS technology easier to work with - a move that will undoubtedly push RSS further into the mainstream.

"In Longhorn, the next version of Windows, we are betting big on RSS," said Hachamovitch. "We're betting this particular way because there aren't enough end users who see it and get it, and it's not easy enough for them yet."

Hachamovitch said that when Longhorn is released, it will provide the user with a common feed list of subscriptions as well as a common feed store of data in the operating system itself.

Chris is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest ebusiness news.