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[Neon]

RSS is an amazing thing, but MS actually just made it better!

Microsoft is extending the popular RSS 2.0 Web syndication format to make it "multidirectional," allowing it to be used for synchronizing information such as contacts and calendar entries across different applications, the company says.

RSS 2.0 is best known as a way to let Internet users subscribe to content from Web sites that support Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. When content on a site is updated, the RSS feed informs the subscriber, often with a summary of the updated content and a link to it.

Microsoft is developing a set of extensions to RSS so that it can be used for exchanging and synchronizing content that is updated by two or more parties. Its goal is to take what is essentially a one-way publishing mechanism and make it multidirectional.

The company published version 0.9 of the specification, called Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) for RSS 2.0, on its Web site earlier in November and is seeking feedback for a final version.

To understand what Microsoft intends the extensions to achieve, imagine two PC users who wish to share and coedit a list of items using an RSS feed. Both people publish their lists using RSS with the sharing extensions, and both also subscribe to the other's feed.

[RedInferno]

THat should be nice....it was only a matter o time before SoMEone thought of this.....with the power of RSS we can have a multitude of 'live' services