From syndication to synchronization: bi-directional RSS is under way with SSE

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's recently appointed CTO, announced this morning the release of a preliminary specification of SSE (Simple Sharing Extensions), allowing RSS to be bi-directional. The draft was released under Creative Commons (Attribution-ShareAlike) - which means that anyone can implement it, hack it, modify it, as long as due credit is given to Microsoft, and changes are also made available under this license.

I'll come back to SEE in a minute but witnessing Microsoft quickly putting together a specification, that had an overstated goal of being simple, making it available under CC and engaging with the industry so openly feels novel. Can someone point to previous examples or is it the first time ? Microsoft's previous efforts to “embrace and extend” industry standards often led to incompatible specifications with proprietary extensions. Ray writes about the genesis of the idea:

Shortly after I started at Microsoft, I had the opportunity to meet with the people behind Exchange, Outlook, MSN, Windows Mobile, Messenger, Communicator, and more.  We brainstormed about this “meshed world” and how we might best serve it - a world where each of these products and others’ products could both manage these objects and synchronize each others’ changes.  We thought about how we might prototype such a thing as rapidly as possible – to get the underpinnings of data synchronization working so that we could spend time working on the user experience aspects of the problem – a much better place to spend time than doing plumbing.

Re SSE, if it is as simple and open as it seems, it could be the building block that has been missing to build richer application interactions, where calendars, contacts, etc. can be peered without going through a centralized repository. Though synchronizing calendars is much harder than people originally think, and that's why calendar companies are getting funded. I wonder if they looked at SyncML, another general purpose XML standard for synchronization. I could not find any mention in the FAQ.

I just saw that Niall thinks he will have working SSE code tonight. Got to love that open source production model. Update: Niall has finished his prototype.