Simon’s Blog

Today, Tim Bray said,

Whoever first provides a family-scheduling tool that non-geeks can use and Just Works with the tools most people run their calendars on is going to make a lot of money…

Of course he’s right. People need to be able to use different calendaring systems, edit their own and others’ calendars in multiple environments (web, phone, desktop clients) in defined ways. For example, family members can edits family calendars, but not corpoprate calendards etc. There is simply a massive unmet software need in this area.

Last November, Microsoft proposed some extensions for RSS and OPML (am I the only one that thinks OPML is not exactly the greatest piece of XML design ever, btw?) called Simple Sharing Extensions (see the draft spec). These are designed to tackle exactly the kind of technical issues surrounding what you might call “mixed calendaring”.

Tim’s blog post made we wonder how the Microsoft RSS team were getting on with SSE. I recall Ray Ozzie saying that the RSS team discussed their work with SSE over on the Microsoft Team RSS Blog. So over I went, and searched for SSE.

What did I find? Not much - their search box returns no results with the search term “SSE”. What gives?! However, I did find an SSE post on the front page, that suggests people subscribe to their FEED-TECH mailing list (send email to: listserv@discuss.microsoft.com with the message body “subscribe feed-tech”), if they want to participate in the SSE conversation.