Thanks Ozzie, for Simple Sharing Extensions

Ray Ozzie's new blog itself is a little disappointing, but the announcement in his second post about the launch by Microsoft of an open extension to RSS, called Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE), is already sending out a few shockwaves around the blogosphere and other parts of the IT industry who are riding the Web 2.0 and social software wave.

According to the spec, what SSE does is to allow us to create "loosely-cooperating apps" that use:

• RSS as the basis for item sharing – that is, the bi-directional, asynchronous replication of new and changed items amongst two or more cross-subscribed feeds.


• OPML as the basis for outline sharing – that is, the bi-directional, asynchronous replication of outlines, such as RSS aggregators subscription lists.

In other words, what SSE will do is allow multi-directional synchronisation of data and objects across multiple applications. BTW If this sounds familiar, Ozzie points out the heritage of the SSE concept with the multi-directional synchronisation found in Lotus Notes.

The big difference of course is that while Notes is proprietary, SSE is an open standard and Microsoft have released it under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. And if what many of us are thinking is right, then we should expect to see quite quickly a whole range of new applications that get mashed together to take advantage of the SSE standard, in the same way the RSS has taken off.

Yes, this is pretty cool :-)

Tags: Ray Ozzie, Simple Sharing Extensions, SSE