MSN Live to Support Sitemap 0.90 Protocol - What does this really mean?

Three months ago, Google and Yahoo! announced that they have joined forces to support a unified system of submitting Web pages to their crawlers. Google launched their Google Sitemaps protocol as part of their Webmaster Tools in June 2005 and Yahoo! recently with their Yahoo! Site Explorer.

On the sitemaps.org website, it states that Microsoft is also supporting this new protocol standard but the question that lies yet to be answered is " How is MSN Lives Sitemaps Submission product going to function?

The day the information was released to the public, the General Manager of Live Search, Ken Moss, announced that they are excited to be apart of the Sitemaps protocol standard. Ken Moss states, We are 100% behind this protocol - this kind of collaboration will help improve the search experience for all of our customers, and we are working hard to release full support in 2007.

I wonder what type of support Microsoft is thinking of providing. As we all know, Microsoft does everything in their power to not only duplicate what their competition has done but also seeks to jeopardize their competition at the same time. If Microsoft is going to create a Sitemaps submission product, I bet they are going to do it in a way that affects many types of web development and consulting firms that offer creation tools and services to submit Sitemaps to Google and Yahoo.

If this happens, I think it will be a bad move for Microsoft. If you look at what Google and Yahoo! have done, theyve created their Sitemaps submission products in a way that allows other web companies to prosper by offering Sitemaps creation tools and services to submit Sitemaps to their search engines.

Now Im just speculating here. So until Microsoft either releases information or launches their beta product to the public we really wont know what they are thinking. I just hope when they say collaborate, they know it means to cooperate and not to dominate.