Microsoft Proposes RSS Extension

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft Chief Technical Officer Ray Ozzie said this week that his company is working on a new extension to RSS that would help users with different contact and calendar software and services synchronize each other's information." From the article: "If this sounds familiar to those using IBM's Lotus Notes, it should. SSE was conceived after Microsoft's recently recruited chief technology officer Ray Ozzie brainstormed with members of the Exchange, Outlook, MSN, Windows Mobile and Messenger Communicator product teams shortly after he joined."

RSS Stuff

[jimmyhat3939]

I can't stand it when they reuse acronyms. As every coder knows, SSE stands for Intel's follow-on to MMX ("streaming simd instruction set"), not "simple sharing extensions". Agh.

Personally I think this is an example of a good technology (RSS) that Microsoft is trying to co-opt by coming out with something marginally "better" -- mostly just more complex -- so they can attain some elements of control over it.

Oh and one other thing - they're basing it on the ideas underlying Exchange and Lotus Notes? I can't wait to see this one.

Re:Yay!

[Utopia]

The RSS standard itself allows for extensions.
The extensions themselves can be standardized.

Pointless

[Kickboy12]

If this software/service follows the same trends as the rest of their products, Microsoft will once again be punted by somebody who takes the same concept one step further. Futher more, Microsoft will some how find a way to make this peice of software so insecure that sombody from India will be able to edit your RSS files. Then Microsoft will claim blasphemy and be yelled at by screaming Linux geeks.

Erego; pointless.

Kerberos

[Anonymous Coward]

Any bets this extension to RSS will be like what they did to Kerberos? It will be incompatible will existing RSS implementations. Any details will have to be reverse engineered or require immense community pressure to have disclosed.

And sombody better cross reference this to Microsoft's patent filings.

why?

[soapdog]

Why use RSS for that when vCard and iCalendar specs already cover that and are implemented by many groupware suites out there. The RFCs cover from HTTP transport of calendar and contact data as well as other MIME enclosures... And it's a simple and elegant format, it's not XML based but it works! Why reinvent the well this time? more info on vCard and iCalendar at http://www.imc.org/pdi/ [imc.org]

RDF

[SWroclawski]

RSS is a form of RDF, and so this idea of an "extension" is a little both misleading and confusing.

Part of the point of RDF is that you can embed lots of vocabularies in a single document. You can say, for example, that a RSS publisher has an attribute FoaF document, or even arbitrary FoaF properies. Or you could use an RDF version of vCard, or RDF iCal...

That's all been part of the Semantic Web for a long time.

It seems that instead of the standards, the proposal is for yet another complete extension from Microsoft.

I think RDF needs help getting the full adoption it needs, but based on what Microsoft has done to other standards (Kerberos, SPF, HTML, etc.) I don't think that this will end up being the right approach to fix any problems RSS has.

Re:Microsoft extensions?

[saskboy]

We all thought JPG, PNG, and MP3 were safe file types, but that turned out to not be the case when you used a vulnerable standard viewer. Adding more stuff introduces more risk. We have to ask is the added usability worth the mild risk?

Rambus, anyone?

[Urusai]

Didn't they work on an open JEDEC standard, only to turn around and patent it before finalization? Perhaps Microsoft will have an RSS patent ere long?

Re:why?

[Thundersnatch]

Outlook & Exchange Server already support vCard and iCal. I think there must be something more to this RSS stuff. Group calendaring is specifically mentioned (which iCal does not support AFAIK).

Creative Commons

[mikeboone]

Microsoft is releasing this spec under a Creative Commons license [creativecommons.org]. So perhaps it's not evil, or at least they're doing a better job of hiding the evil part!

Re:Cha?

[Trigun]

You have to realize that Microsoft attracts the best and the brightest. That's not the best and the brightest programmers, but the best and the brightest managers, and the best and the brightest lawyers. Even if the programmers come out with the digital version of sliced bread, the managers will do what they do best and departmentalize the task, impose deadlines, and micro-manage. The Accountants will decide how to best make a profit off of this work. And the lawyers will implement it to ensure that there is nothing free or open about it.

It's not just Microsoft, it's business. The sad fact is that Microsoft is even better at business than it is at programming.

Re:RSS Stuff

[ergo98]

Personally I think this is an example of a good technology (RSS) that Microsoft is trying to co-opt by coming out with something marginally "better" -- mostly just more complex -- so they can attain some elements of control over it.

RSS is the absolutely height of simplicity. While that simplicity works for getting it out there and initially adopted, it does toss a wrench in it being a sustainable, growing technology. RSS is definitely showing signs of weakness (and the "next geners" are already chomping at the bit to switch to ATOM. I believe Google already tried to kill RSS), but thankfully it was built to support extensions (primarily just by supporting XML namespaces, but extensions were a part of the initial design).

I rashly proposed my own simplistic extension to RSS [yafla.com] to great improve the mechanical interpretation of RSS entries in certain domains.

Re:Embrace and extend

[node 3]

It's just one of those things where you have to defer to reality.

Yes, theoretically, Microsoft could act responsibly and cooperatively with regards to a public standard. However, given MS's past (ie: the reality of Microsoft), it makes sense to be extraordinarily skeptical of the outcome here.

It's like this, you have this public well in the center of town, and anyone can come and take a drink, and can volunteer to help maintain and operate the well. There's one guy in town, Prince William the Third, who is known for taking free, public services and corrupting them, selling them, and otherwise claiming such things are immoral because they don't make anyone any money. He's gone into the public park, cordoned it off and charged people to play in his area. He's set vermin free in the communal corn fields. And at the local mercantile, he always takes a penny, but never leaves a penny.

So you see him heading to the well with a large bucket and a drill... Do you think he's going to:

A. Drill holes into his large bucket to loop the rope through, giving to the town a larger bucket making it easier for them to bring up water.

or

B. Fill up his big bucket, then drill a hole into the current bucket about halfway up to make using the public bucket a bit more difficult, and oh, btw, you can buy some water from his huge bucket.

Yeah, maybe this time MS will play fair. I wouldn't bet on it. In fact, I'd say it's extremely foolish to think they'll do anything other than subvert the standard in a way that's designed to most benefit them. That's just what they do. Every single action MS makes is designed to give them the most competitive advantage they can get. There's nothing terribly wrong with this, just don't be so naive as to pretend they're even remotely likely to do otherwise.

It's not that we hate MS, so we don't trust them, it's that they've lost our trust, so we hate them. They could easily earn it back. IBM did it, Apple did it. Hopefully, some day MS will do it, too.

Hopefully this will all work out for the best, but skepticism is definitely called for.