Ray Ozzie announced Simple Sharing Extensions for RSS and OPML this morning. Ray explains on his weblog the need to synchronize data such as contacts, calendaring, and read status on a wide range of devices across multiple profiles such as personal, family, and professional. The new namespace is the first extension of OPML I know of. Ray mentions there “nothing to announce right now in terms of which [Microsoft] products will support the spec, when, and for what purpose, but people are experimenting with it and are intrigued.”
The acronym “SSE” makes me think of Intel’s Streaming SIMD Extensions processor instruction set but I suppose that can be overcome.
I think developers will wait and see what implementations of Simple Sharing Extensions take hold within Microsoft before coding against the developing specification. Having access to Microsoft’s large customer base will be enough motivation to drive adoption across each industry vertical the company touches. Dave Winer will continue to evangelize the idea throughout the industry as he has been for years. I think Atom can also be easily added as a supported format as the specification moves towards version 1.0.
I started writing an exporter for NetNewsWire that I hope to finish tonight. If any feed aggregator developers would like to brainstorm about an ideal output format for feeds and individual items please contact me and we can have some working code tonight.