In news that certainly is not making the existing RSS Aggregator companies happy, Microsoft Outlook program manager Michael Affronti has soft announced that RSS will be integrated with Outlook 12.
This will not only hurt the NewsGators and Attensas of the RSS space (those that have Outlook plugins to display RSS feeds). It will also impact Bloglines and others as users inevitably move their reading habits to the email client. The ability to drag stories right into subject folders, that may or may not contain emails as well, is just too useful to ignore (and that’s why I liked Yahoo’s integration of RSS with email so much a few weeks ago).
Robert Scoble also wrote about this, and brings up a very important point. Users want RSS in many different ways (mobile, web when they are away from their home computer, etc.). Syncronization is extremely important and this may be the niche that allows existing players to survive.
And I also agree with Robert when he says that RSS integration with Outlook will get millions more people using RSS.