Okay, when I wrote about SQL Everywhere and said I just don't get it, I didn't.  In fact I'm still fence sitting over the fact that people should just have a database on their system as an information repository that would be the be all and end all for data storage.

But the mobile guys definately stand by the need for it, and mabster has kept pushing forward different ideas which shows that he's obviously excited about it, and in some ways is showing me the error of my ways.  I'd still have liked to have seen what WinFS could have done if it had of continued.

So when you see me naysaying anything here, and I'm going to be balanced on this because I see it has extremely great potential, and I think it's a great product, but when you see me saying anything negative - just understand that I may not get it all, and I want to and it's just my opinion and it'd be fantastic if you left a comment with yours.

So.  What is InfoCenter?  As far as I can see it's an RSS aggregator.

Yeah thats a pretty simple way of looking at things, but hey that's what it is.  There could well be hundreds of them, heck even mabster himself wrote one a while back just to test out the IE7 feeds.

It's written by one guy, Marc Mecuri, a Microsoft employee who saw the need for his business clients, who went out on his own time and did all this  and now has Microsoft backing.

It was also the topic of this weeks DotNetRocks show (2006-07-25) with Carl Franklin (and Richard Campbell), which is where I heard about it.

It's also exciting even though from what I gather it's an RSS feed aggregator with privilages.

The fact that it is a one man show, is pretty impressive, and I think a few tools from Microsoft are starting out that way lately - which may be an indication of just how powerful these tools are and how Microsoft is empowering developers.

So what benefits does it have?  Well according to the show and the site it can do things like background transfer information, transfer files down to your machine (or maybe that is in the future, I was a bit muddled), and it will have channels of information about topics, such as the .NET Framework 3.0 tools coming out like WF, WPF, WCF, etc.

And some of these Channels will have information provided by the teams in charge of them and from lists provided around Microsoft.

Also things such as CDs and DVDs from Microsoft could come with a tagged file to aggregate them into the program, to read what you have in your catalogue and what is on the disc, movies, music, feeds, whatever could come tagged to be aggregated into your news media hub.

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So here's where the negative points come in:

1) Do we need another aggregator?  There's hundreds of them... they all do a good job, but they do similar jobs... It's very hard to make anything seem too different - although I do know that some of us like the River of News, and some just like it broken into different articles... and some of us like it a different way each day.

2) Isn't this guy shooting his own company in the foot a little bit?  IE7 comes with feeds, Vista is coming with feed technology, Outlook is coming with feeds which you can then do tasks like email, calendar, etc out of...  Why is Microsoft/This Guy coming out with competing technology - maybe because it is needed.

3) Do we need another digg or technorati, or ...?

Thats basically the end of my problems right there...

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Now for the benefits:

1) I can get feeds, data, audio, video, whatever linked all into the one system?!  That's pretty cool and it just gets you excited where this could continue - hell could I do Google or Microsoft mapping mashups within the same program to geocode feeds, or could we have people mashing up their posts/podcasts/wikis/flickr/whatever to provide one central topical megapost?  Anything could be possible in future versions here.

2) Having a location that could potentially be a great rating system for all you can read about a product or solution coming out of Microsoft - a Microsoft place of aggregation that could be an automated Robert Scoble, could be brilliant.

3) Endless potential.

So you can see, I am fence sitting this one, but I'm more than willing to give up my aggregator and give this a shot.

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Here are some things I would like to see though:

1) The ability to integrate with Outlook - to build a calendar or email or something from a post.

2) The ability to determine where to download a file like a podcast - for instance, if I could download all torrent files to a particular location, then I could leverage utorrent to automatically begin downloading them.  Heck it could be like pwopcatcher a little and actually integrate with utorrent - although that could be a little too much red tape for Redmond.

3) The ability to schedule any file download times (ie not when I'm surfing, dude).

4) Out of all the social networking and technorati, etc talk theres one that I think has always been a little overlooked, and that's Yahoo! Music - Launchcast.  I really believe that their way of recommending music to me is brilliant.  It doesn't just recommend everything and most hits wins - Digg style.  It has a look at what I'm subscribed to, what other people are subscribed to that enjoy the same things I do, what rates highly, and whats new.  And then it mixes it all in and gives me something new to look at.

Even if it was just one random RSS feed that everyone gets with the new stuff that they can take one look at and sub or pass on, or one feed per person that shows a few blogs/casts that are similar to what you listen to and are rated highly by others.

It takes the social aspect of something like this and builds upon it all. Instead of one person recommending it to you, it's 10, or 100, or 1000 - who are similar in taste and interest to you.

5) For the love of God, give me an application which I can sync between computers for just feeds.

I don't want a web app to read feeds on, I like my power and responsiveness and not needing to refresh in a Windows app.  But I would like my computers at home and at work to sync so I know what I have and haven't read.

6) And because of that I would also like to be able to say DO NOT DOWNLOAD FILES TO THIS MACHINE.  This is the one thing I hate about File Sharing in Live Messenger.  The fact that I hop on there and someone who I share files with starts happening at work and I need to remember to pause it.  And hell, I already got the file at home as well.

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Like I said, this is really exciting and I hope I'm actually along the right path in thinking about this product - I won't be sure until I have it downloaded and I get to play around with it... but it's something to watch out for!

[ETA: I really do wonder if InfoCenter passes the Lawyer naming tests... if you Google there are a tonne of Infocenters for everything out there.  It makes me wonder if we'll see this product renamed to Windows Live Information Center Space. And also if in .au we can call it InfoCentre :)]

And just a hit on Marc's Trackback.