I realized I completely forgot the most important feature for Windows Media Player 11 when I made a post for Robert Scoble's request the other day. Podcasting support. Right now, WMP comes pre-programmed with Radio stations that are internet available, but in the future, the obvious is to support podcasting. Since iTunes does it, it only seems logical that WMP should too.

Now, take a look around before you implement it, and read the feedback coming in about iTunes. Everyone's thrilled that podcasting is going mainstream, and 1,000,000 subscriptions in 2 days is tremendous, but there's a lot that isn't being done right, or at least could be better.

So here's a couple of suggestions: Don't make any unnecessary additions to RSS to support podcasting. It's being done now, and for the most part, it works just fine. One exception (something many podcasters are trying to figure out) is show notes. Figure out a way to integrate show notes with the podcast, and come up with a way to display them. Ideally, this would be something that could allow certain parts of the notes to only show up after a certain time period of the podcast. For example, Mondays lists out URLs at various times throughout the show, and it would be very cool if those links only showed up once you hit that spot in the show, so you know the latest link is the one you need, and you don't have to go sifting through them. Make the notes window separate from the rest of Windows Media Player, and allow me to pin it.

Of course, there needs to be a simple way to subscribe. There's two ways to do that, right? One is to provide a nice set that are available through WMP's online home, like iTunes does. The other is to make links in pages easy to add to WMP. This could be a right click menu item in your browser, or it could be even slicker. When you clicked on the link, "something" could look at the link, see that it is a feed link, and that it has enclosures, and ask you if you want to add it to WMP's podcast list. That would be ideal!

I think I got everything now!