I’ve been a netizen since ’93 and I saw web for the first time in ’94, when a friend showed me Yahoo . I felt dizzy just thinking about possibilities.

I had no idea what was coming, but even though web came a long way since then, I never felt so excited again up until now. It’s hard to predict future and I avoid revealing my stupidity if possible, but it really looks like a no-brainer predicting a vastly different, more open and collaborative web in few years time than we have now.

Feeds were a big step forward. It wasn’t necessary to scrap pages to reuse information anymore. Even more importantly, feeds changed the attitude so sharing and reusing content is now again a normal and good thing.

It seems atom publishing protocol will soon be ratified and with it a standard way of editing web resources. In fact making sharing a two-way street. The final piece was provided by Ray Ozzie and guys at Microsoft. A synchronization protocol for RSS feeds called SSE published under creative commons license that should be really useful for synchronizing calendars, contacts etc.

I’ve read it a couple of days ago and I couldn’t find an obvious defect in it (apart from a small error in the example at point 2.2.2, which I’m sure has been spotted since). Truth be told, I didn’t expect it to.

It’s a simple, easy to understand specification. I wish people would stop using date-time values conforming to RFC 822, but nevertheless SSE shouldn’t be difficult to implement.

It probably really is the easiest thing that could work and it’s up to programmers to show if it might be too easy. There’s always a tension between things you specify and things you leave to implementation. Freedom given can and usually is a point of misunderstandings and until there are enough implementations in the wild, it’s hard to judge the quality of compromise.

I won’t be surprised though if final specification version won’t be significantly different than current one. I’ll try to make our implementation as soon as possible and hopefully by that time there will be others to test it with.