Two years ago at the first Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) dedicated to Longhorn, Microsoft officials showed how Microsoft planned to support Really Simple Syndication (RSS) in Longhorn.

On Friday, the Redmond, Wash., software mogul is set to provide an update on its plans for baking RSS into Longhorn. Microsoft is expected to take the wraps off its updated strategy at the Gnomedex conference, which kicks of in Seattle tomorrow.

Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) team, will deliver one of keynotes at Gnomedex on Friday. While some industry watchers were speculating over the past couple of weeks that Microsoft might use the conference to launch the first beta of IE 7.0, it seems more likely that Hachamovitch will, instead, discuss how Microsoft plans to build RSS support directly into the version of IE that will be integrated into Longhorn.

Dave Winer, who runs the ScriptingNews.com Web log and also is set to keynote Gnomedex, provided some of the back story on Microsoft's RSS plans on his site on Wednesday.

"On Friday you'll see how deeply integrated RSS is in the architecture of the browser. But that's just the tip of what may turn out to be a very big iceberg," Winer said.

"The people at Microsoft noticed something that I had seen, only peripherally -- that there were applications of RSS that aren't about news. Like Audible's NY Times Best Seller list, or an iTunes music playlist, or lists of SharePoint documents, or browser bookmarks. Lists are all over the place, and people are starting to move them around via RSS, and they are not the usual kind of data that has been carried by RSS in the past."

While Microsoft officials declined to provide more specifics about the planned announcement, a spokeswoman did confirm that Microsoft will talk more on Friday about lists and RSS and their relevance to Longhorn at the Gnomedex conference.

Microsoft increasingly has been experimenting with RSS across the company. In addition to providing an ever-growing number of RSS feeds for Microsoft-employee bloggers and Web sites, various teams have engaged in other RSS-specific projects.

Last month, MSN officials discussed Microsoft's plans to build syndication feeds into the messaging alerts, a Windows screen saver and Web search. The MSN unit launched earlier this year its MSN Spaces blogging tool and has built a protoype of an RSS aggregator, known as Start.com, which is in beta test. Microsoft Research's social-computing group dabbled with RSS as part of its "Wallop" social-networking project. (A number of the social-computing researchers recently joined the Windows division.)

Various Microsoft employees have built RSS-specific projects on their own time, as well. Addy Santo, a senior consultant with Microsoft Consulting Service's Center of Excellence developed an application called BlogWave that enables the automated generation and scheduled publishing of RSS feeds.

Although not a Microsoft-labeled product, Santo's tool might provide some indication of the type of information that Microsoft could syndicate beyond just content. BlogWave is especially, but not exclusively, tuned to publish SharePoint lists and libraries as RSS feeds, with no SharePoint Server modifications required.

When Microsoft first discussed its plans for RSS and Longhorn at the PDC 2003, it planned to provide an RSS-feed reader via the "Sidebar" pane that was originally set to be part of the Longhorn user interface. At the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference this spring, however, Microsoft officials acknowledged that Sidebar was unlikely to be part of the revamped Longhorn client, which is set to ship later next year.

Microsoft partners said that the IE team is planning to provide RSS support as an integrated part of IE 7.0. Microsoft officials have declined to comment on the planned IE 7.0 feature list. IE 7.0 is expected to be integrated into Longhorn, as well as to be ported to Windows XP and subsequent Windows releases.