SSE (Simple Sharing Extensions) Loosely Coupled!
November 21, 2005
Brian blogged generally on the topic of "loosely joined" last week. This week Ray Ozzie, Microsoft CTO blogged about a new specification that Microsoft is proposing called the SSE specification (simple sharing extensions). Ray details:
As an industry, we have simply not designed our calendaring and directory software and services for this “mesh” model. The websites, services and servers we build seem to all want to be the “owner” and “publisher”; it’s really inconsistent with the model that made email so successful, and the loosely-coupled nature of the web.
The SSE Faq describes the following benefits of the new standard:
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.
SSE allows you to replicate any set of independent items (for example, calendar entries, lists of contacts, list of favorites, blogrolls) using simple RSS semantics. If you can publish your data as an RSS feed, the simple addition of SSE will allow you to replicate your data to any other application that implements the SSE specification.
The new XML elements described in SSE enable feed readers and publishers to generate and process incoming item changes in a manner that enables consistency to be achieved. In order to accomplish this, SSE introduces concepts such as per-item change history (to manage item versions and update conflicts) and tombstones (to propagate deletions, and un-deletions).
So, basically, the new SSE standard will change everything. Microsoft is releasing SSE under the Creative Commons - are they starting to get it or what? I will be blogging about it further, you can bet on that…
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