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Ray Ozzie on Really Simple Sharing

I've been a fan of Ray Ozzie for years since I was big into Lotus Notes during the 90's. My interest in Notes has waned but I still admire the way Ray thinks. He's at Microsoft now and reports directly to Bill Gates.

Over the holidays I've been getting caught up on 'old news' and one of the items I wanted to dig into was the announcement by Microsoft to create an extention to RSS called SSE.

RSS is a one way protocol. You have a URL that you poll every so often to see what's new. Microsoft has developed a spec that extends this to a two way protocol.

This would allow you to do things like get updates for a calendar then send back any conflicts so they can be resolved, for example. Ray talks about this and much more that's being prototyped at Microsoft for the last few weeks. Very exciting work especially when you consider that Microsoft has put the SSE spec (extention to RSS) into a Creative Commons license and has throw it out for others to further refine and harden. This is new behavior for Microsoft.

Check out this blog for more information on this topic and a better and simple explaination the potential impact of SSE. I've added Ray's blog to my blogroll.

Here are the details about the new spec clipped from the end of his blog article.

At this point, various groups at Microsoft have begun to further develop their early prototypes to see what we can learn, and to ensure that the spec is sufficient. 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. It’s time to bring the spec to you, so that you can do the same.

We’ve numbered the draft specification 0.9 because we have a good degree of confidence in its usefulness based on the prototyping that we’ve done thus far, but it’s certainly not a 1.0 and I would certainly caution against building anything ‘production’ on it quite yet.

Here’s the draft spec for SSE, and here’s a FAQ that we put together. A forum where we can talk about it amongst implementers will be forthcoming.

(Props for making the spec and early prototypes actually happen go out to the individuals in many product groups - you know who you are - who were motivated enough to want to enable this scenario for users. And to Dave for extending it to OPML. It's been fun working with all of you, and impressive how rapidly this could happen.)

One other important point: We’re releasing the SSE specification under a Creative Commons license – Attribution-ShareAlike. I’m very pleased that Microsoft is supporting the Creative Commons approach; you can see more about this at in the licensing section at the end of the spec.