Really Simple Syndication? Yes. As a technology, so far it’s primarily been restricted to serving up news from the web, but developing events suggest that it has a rather more extensive destiny with its capabilities.

As a user tool, RSS has a lot to offer. As a programming one, there’s even more potential. News is an obvious use, with an application capable of reading RSS feeds being able to invisibly serve up the latest happenings and present them on screen – but there’s no reason to be that obvious about it. The exact same technology can provide an automatic update checker, only kicking into action when it detects a new version available – or use RSS’ support for ‘enclosures’ to access files directly. Enclosures are straight links to files, which doesn’t sound like much to write home about, until you look at the current fuss surrounding podcasting and videocasting.

Sharing made simple
We’re already seeing some impressive uses for this. Audioville – www.audioville.co.uk – is an online audiobook store that gives you an RSS feed to plug into iTunes or any other podcast-capable audio player. When you buy a book or tape, rather than having to download all of the files – unencrypted MP3 files, incidentally – your podcast tool automatically pulls them down onto your machine and copies them into your media collection, ready for listening.

There’s no shortage of other such examples we could draw on, from office tools that keep filling your collection with fonts and clip-art, to inspiring users of a video tool with a regular feed of everyone else’s latest achievements. Calendar systems, reminder tools: anything that can benefit from web-based information can benefit from an update system based around RSS standards, rather than a whole new proprietary technology.

Which brings us to Microsoft’s offering: Simple Sharing Extensions. Extensions to RSS are nothing new: Apple makes heavy use of them for podcast support in the iTunes Music Store, and Yahoo! has its own set for media handling, but Microsoft’s are rather more dramatic. In essence, SSE aims to turn RSS bi-directional. RSS itself, the feeds and items within them, and the directory style OPML are being worked on. In the former cases, it offers bi-directional, asynchronous replication and updates of cross-subscribed feeds, while the latter deals with outlines. Additional elements of the specification handle problems with conflict resolution.

A practical example would look something like this: a post, edited multiple times, but only keeping the last four edits.

 <item>
 <description>This is a test item </description>
 <sx:sync id=”0a7903db47fb0ae8” version=”6”>
 <sx:history when=”Thu, 26 May 2005 09:43:33 GMT” by=”REO1750”>
 <sx:update when=”Wed, 25 May 2005 09:43:33 GMT” by=”REO1750” />
 <sx:update when=”Tue, 24 May 2005 09:43:33 GMT” by=”REO1750” />
 <sx:update when=”Mon, 23 May 2005 09:43:33 GMT” by=”REO1750” />
 </sx:history>
 </sx:sync>
 </item> 

Needless to say, this hasn’t been the most popular extension on the block. RSS is firmly an independent format, and Microsoft a company in desperate need of a trustworthy image. That said, the licensing shows a few interesting choices:

Microsoft’s copyrights in this specification are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License (version 2.5). To view a copy of this licence, visit creativecommons.org. As to software implementations, Microsoft is not aware of any patent claims it owns or controls that would be necessarily infringed by a software implementation that conforms to the specification’s extensions. That still leaves plenty of potential for problems, but it’s a good start.