Ray Ozzie announces the new Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE specs) for RSS and OPML:

There are many great item synchronization mechanisms out there (and at Microsoft), but we decided we’d never get short term network effects among products if we selected something complicated – even if it were powerful. What we really longed for was “the RSS of synchronization” … something simple that would catch on very quickly.

Ozzie refers to this project as being before it is “fully baked” but it won’t be baked on a completely commercial path. The spec is being released with a Creative Commons Atribution-ShareAlike license.

Dave Winer who Ozzie credits as an innovator is beaming and shows some love back:

I’ve always had enormous respect for Ray as a technologist and because he’s a gentle and thoughtful person. There was an outliner in Notes, but I remember very well sitting in an audience hearing Ray tell people about it, and then calling me out as one of the people who blazed the trail for his work. It’s so important to recognize each others’ accomplishments, because that’s how you build trusting relationships.

Now that all the backslapping, handshakes and high fives are done, what does this really mean for real world applications? Perhaps the SSE FAQ will help:

SSE defines the minimum extensions necessary to enable loosely cooperating applications to use RSS as the basis for item sharing—that is, the bidirectional, asynchronous replication of new and changed items among two or more cross-subscribed feeds. For example, SSE could be used to share your work calendar with your spouse. If your calendar were published to an SSE feed, changes to your work calendar could be replicated to your spouse’s calendar, and vice versa. As a result, your spouse could see your work schedule and add new appointments, such as a parent-teacher meeting at the school, or a doctor’s appointment.

I need to dig into this much more but so far I like what I’m reading and seeing — at least in theory. Whether it works or not in actual real world application as described above is another thing.

Danny Ayers isn’t impressed. I imagine most of the folks embracing Atom are going to have mixed emotions about this, but at the end of the day a single format would be best for the end users and developers instead of what, nine or ten versions that are currently available out there?

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