Microsoft Proposes RSS Extension

Microsoft Chief Technical Officer Ray Ozzie said this week that his company is working on a new extension to RSS that would help users with different contact and calendar software and services synchronize each other's information.

Called Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE), the specification is currently at version 0.9 because Microsoft believes that it has a high degree of usefulness in its current state. Howver, Ozzie cautioned anyone from building production applications on top of it just yet.

"There's nothing to announce right now in terms of which products will support the spec, when, and for what purpose, but people are experimenting with it and are intrigued," Ozzie wrote in a Web log post. "It's time to bring the spec to you, so that you can do the same."

Ozzie says work on the standard began shortly after he joined Microsoft when it purchased his company, Groove. He explains that the current method of software as both the "owner" and "publisher" does not fit with the "mesh" model of how we share our information -- a combination of private, public and shared items.

Thus, Ozzie along with several Microsoft teams including the Exchange, Outlook, MSN, Windows Mobile, Messenger, and Communicator groups began work on SSE.

Much of the way the specification functions is based on the structure of Lotus Notes, which Ozzie helped create while at IBM in the late 1980s. "Everything about the design was about implementation simplicity and efficiency. So if simple is the goal, why not just adapt the Notes replication algorithm to this need?" he says.

"Notes 'notefiles' could be analogous to RSS 'feeds;' and Notes 'notes' could be analogous to RSS 'items'; and Notes 'items' could be analogous to XML 'elements,'" Ozzie continued. He said that Notes had "just about the simplest possible replication mechanism imaginable."

Dave Winer has also been involved with the specification, extending it to work with OPML and providing advice to the Microsoft team on how to build the extension.

"Microsoft's new approach to synchronizing RSS and OPML, using methods pioneered in Ozzie's earlier work, and keeping the 'really simple' approach that's worked so well with networked syndication and outlining, combines the best of our two schools of thought, and this creativity is available for everyone to use," Winer wrote on his Web log on Monday.

The draft of the standard as well as a FAQ on SSE are available from the MSDN Web site. Microsoft is allowing public use of the standard under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

"I'm very pleased that Microsoft is supporting the Creative Commons approach," Ozzie wrote.