In his festive address to Redmond troops, Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s CTO, looked forward to happy days working with his brother Jack and his concept development group “to rapidly incubate many ideas that have been spinning around in our minds”. Presumably one of these is the concept of Simple Shared Extensions which he floated at the end of last month.
Jack, who is development manager for the concept group, expounded further. Then I left a comment on his blog.
As far as I could make out at the time, SSE would be a simple way of creating synchronisation of RSS feeds and Microsoft was making it available under a Creative Commons license.
I half-grasped the concept but being only half a geek, I wanted some practical examples and asked Jack how SSE might work, for example, in the travel business.
George Moromisato, another former member of Groove Networks who now works at MSN, responded with some ideas.
George wrote:
The interesting bit about SSE is that it allows two-way, multi-master replication. By that I mean:
1. “Two-way” in the sense that I can modify other people’s items (and they can modify my items).
2. “Multi-master” in the sense that no one place holds the “truth”. The data exists on multiple places (servers); I can change it in one place and it will replicate to the others.Applying this to the travel industry, I would say that we should avoid scenarios that just deal with notification. Scenarios where you just need to be informed of changes to a schedule (or whatever) can probably be done with just plain RSS.
But imagine a scenario where you are creating an itinerary with a travel agent (or with your spouse or friends or whatever). You might both want to be able to edit the itinerary. For example, you might create the initial calendar entries for when you want to travel. The travel agent might edit those entries to include the exact date. You might then add entries for specific tours that you might want to take. The travel agent could then edit those entries to include additional information (time/place, reservation info, etc.)
Even better, because SSE is “multi-master” you can have a copy of the itinerary both on the travel agency server and on your laptop. You can always view your itinerary (and even make changes) on your laptop even if you’re not online. When you finally get an internet connection, your laptop can automatically synchronize with the travel agency server.
This helps enormously (and thanks George for the response).
I am now going to sit in a dark room to try and imagine further applications on my own. Then I shall float it with some travel clients and test their reaction. Stay tuned.
Technorati Tags: ozzie, microsoft, rss, travel, travelpr, SSE, simplesharingextensions
Technorati Tags: ozzie, microsoft, rss, travel, travelpr, SSE, simplesharingextensions
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