shahine.com/omar/

Ray just blogged about something he and his CTO team have cooked up since joining Microsoft. He calls is Simple Sharing Extensions, and it’s a really cool way to solve some hella hard problems by bootstraping on RSS. I got wind of SSE a while back when Ray came down to meet some of us in Hotmail. It was the first time I met Ray and I was incredibly impressed with what he had to say, and the approach he was taking to solving the problem around sharing of calendar and contacts data. Here is why SSE will succeed where other technologies have failed:

1. It doesn’t invent anything that doesn’t already exist. SSE makes use of RSS and XML namespaces.
2. It does not dictate a transport protocol. Anything can be used, including such things as HTTP and P2P file sharing
3. It doesn’t dictate how the RSS fragments are ACL’ed.

It’s quite simple, yet very powerful way to deliver software that can finally allow users to share data in a “mesh” scenario. I really look forward to one day sharing certain events on my calendar with my wife, and allowing her to read/write into my calendar (we both have Exchange accounts in different places as well as MSN Calendar accounts and we can’t do simple calendar sharing).

Congrats to Ray, Jack and George for getting this out there.