I’ve played around with IE7 a little. It completely hijacks RSS. For example, clicking directly on my RSS feed link on my blog normally gives you the nicely formatted FeedBurner view. I like this view: it looks good and explains RSS to novices. It also lists several readers that a user might want to use for reading RSS. IE7 gives a different view (i.e., the IE7 Feed reader), of course gives you no options, and asks if you want to subscribe to the feed.

Of course, this is probably a benefit to IE7-only subscribers since the unsubscribed / subscribed views are virtually identical.

I could find no way to import OPML into the reader, ensuring that I wouldn’t really try it out. I also could find no way to export OPML. Maybe this is hidden somewhere in some common Feed tools, but I couldn’t find them. OPML can be imported / exported using the Import / Export wizard — clicking on the “+” icon brings up the menu from which to select this (I guess I was blinded by the strange / docking / undocking behavior of the Favorites pane).

The IE7 blog talks about the “OPML game” and how this new Windows RSS Platform solves this problem.

Dave Winer points to an article that discusses this very “problem” of importing / exporting OPML. He wonders if the author believes that people only run software on their desktop.

Don’t worry, Dave, I’m sure that Microsoft will sync the subscriptions with Microsoft Live! 😉