Microsoft’s simple list extensions to RSS were launched at Gnomedex 5 with much fanfare. Simple List Extensions improve the experience of working with lists of information delivered through RSS– things like your Netflix queue, to-do lists, job feeds, and so forth.

The proposal inspired a brief flurry of activity in technical blogs; here’s my post on the topic. Much was made of the fact that the spec was released under a Creative Commons license, with Lawrence Lessig appearing on video to praise the release. The world has much to gain in general from a Microsoft that knows how to evangelize an open standard, and in particular RSS would benefit greatly from an effective list standard.

Unfortuantely, Microsoft has done little so far to evangelize or even fully specify the standard. The specification and community process wiki haven’t seen updates since June.

In a list ditch effort, I contacted Dean Hachamovitch, lead of the IE team, and Sean Lyndersay, the PM in charge of the spec.

To their credit, they gave me some helpful examples including the live Amazon feeds that use the simple list extensions, and said the right things about wanting to support and finalize the spec– they’ve been quite busy getting the IE7 beta out the door. Sean promised to post links to the live feeds and the updated specifications by Wednesday this week.

If I were Microsoft, or a competitor of Microsoft, I would take an open source RSS reader like RSS Bandit, add support for the extensions, and support the extensions whereever they made sense on early adopter sites like MSDN. Sadly, Microsoft doesn’t do much of this sort of gonzo development these days– they hitch everything to big, slow moving ship trains. (Prove me wrong guys!)

Longer term, the innovators in RSS extensions will be the companies that can test new extensions without requiring users to manually upgrade their RSS Readers, and that have the ability to trial those extensions in feeds that have sufficiently broad readership. This argues either for zero install web based aggregators like Bloglines, or a client aggregator that can automatically and seamlessly upgrade itself.

While I’m on the topic, Rss-extensions.org is a Wiki about efforts by companies and standards groups to extend RSS.