Ray Ozzie on ‘Simple Sharing Extensions’

An interesting post from Ray Ozzie – one of the most influential people to have joined Microsoft in the last five years.

I’ll paraphrase by stealing quotes:

Each of us has a mix of private, shared, and public events and meetings that we’re tracking.
Some of these we edit privately and publish to others.
The most challenging calendars we deal with are those that are “shared”
It’s tough because we use a mix of different email/calendaring systems
And the same goes for contact lists.

Sounds familar!

What we really longed for was “the RSS of synchronization” … something simple that would catch on very quickly.
so we created an RSS extension that we refer to as Simple Sharing Extensions or SSE.

Fair enough – another MS developed extension. Wait – there’s more:

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.

Now that’s smart.

Hopefully some of these concepts will be adopted in main-stream products; more cutting edge projects like Hula should be all over this.

My main concern is still around security and authorisation – I don’t want to send a private calendar to a colleague – for it to be shared publically. That’s a real problem with things like this.