Here’s a nifty add-in for Internet Explorer 7 from Microsoft’s IE RSS team – Feeds Plus:

[… Feeds Plus] adds two features to the Windows Feeds experience: aggregation and notification. […] Feeds Plus, running in the background, can combine multiple feeds into a single, river of news-style feed. All the user has to do is turn on Feeds Plus’ aggregator, and every folder of feeds will sprout an aggregate feed at the top.

[…] A pop-up feed notification reminiscent of Outlook’s is the second feature in Feeds Plus. […] With Feeds Plus, the user can choose which feeds matter most to them and get a pop-up ‘toast’ as soon as those feeds have new items waiting. The pop-up is designed to be unobtrusive—it fades in and out and won’t go crazy and flash every half second—and it includes a handy link to the feeds that it’s announcing.

I don’t use IE7 for managing my RSS subscriptions (I use a combination of Feed Demon and NewsGator Online), but if I did, I’d definitely find this add-in extremely useful.

Still, I installed it and this is what it can do with just a few feeds, set for a river of news style, ie, showing the results from all feeds together:

You can manipulate this list with the filtering options you see on the right in the screenshot. And in the Feed Plus applet itself, accessible from the system tray on your desktop, you can configure the apps behaviour with choices for how it runs, when it runs, how it updates feeds, etc.

With the imminent arrival of Windows Vista – launching next week on Jan 31 – which includes IE7, such easy functionality can only be a good thing for helping broaden the appeal of RSS to the general Windows user.