I want to be able to subscribe to a feed for a limited time.  Let me say:  “I want to pay attention to this feed for 2 weeks”, or 3 months, or whatever.  When the time is up, prompt me to re-subscribe, and show me the dates and contents of a couple of the most recent posts.  This would make subscribing to threads on message boards (like Channel9 or MSDN Forums) so much more practical, and it would let me decide to “try out” feeds that I would otherwise ignore.

Ok, finally got through a couple minutes after my last post.  Right now the list only includes:

• SQL Server 2005 CTP – September 2005 (Many Editions)
  
• Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite – Release Candidate
  
• Visual Studio 2005 Team Test Load Agent – Release Candidate

Hopefully we’ll see more later today!

Rick H.

SQL Server 2005 CTP, September 2005 (Many editions)…

What else?  Not sure..  As I tried to move forward in the new downloads list, the server became unresponsive, and now is just spitting out this error when you try to get to Subscriber Downloads:

An Error Has Occurred

We’re sorry. An error has occurred, and we cannot process your request. This may be a temporary problem, and you can try again in a few minutes.
You can try to:

• Contact support

Good luck downloading today, the servers are already showing the strain at 5:55AM Eastern, but that may also be because they are still uploading stuff as well.

Advice for Microsoft:  Get whomever keeps http://Microsoft.com up and running to give the http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/ folks some pointers on load management & availability, and throw some more money at bandwidth and server capacity, especially when you know there’s going to be heavy demand.  You have no idea how many geeks you’re giving a bad impression to when you can’t handle the strain at the subscriptions site.  These are folks that are invested in your technology.  You want to keep them happy!  (I know it’s a hard problem, especially with multi-gigabyte iso downloads. Talk to your MSR folks and get their Avalanche technology integrated into the download manager {as a voluntary option}.  You guys & gals should be able to solve this…)

Dare Obasanjo lays some pretty heavy hints about MSN’s upcoming developer story.  He includes several session descriptions for MSN related content at the PDC, and provides a link to a teaser page at http://msdn.microsoft.com/msn

Read the post for more details, this could get interesting…

My initial impression: “Yawn….”

You can download the software at http://talk.google.com.  The one interesting angle I can see is the voice chat, but I don’t think that will get much exposure unless people really start using Google Talk as their primary IM client.  The whole voice-chat thing always suffers from poor quality audio input/output on “typical users'” machines, so I’m wondering if that feature will really get any traction.  Aside from that, the integration with Gmail is nice, but it doesn’t give me a whole lot more functionality than the Gmail notifier did.

One more IM on the market…