I haven’t fully gotten my head around Ray Ozzie’s announcement of SSE, a two-way RSS that allows you to not only receive new data but send and sync new data. I’m delighted that he consulted Dave Winer in the process, by the way. Ozzie mentions SSE’s use in such applications as calendaring and contacts. But I wonder if there’s not something else here, something about making one-way feeds two-way, something about making RSS conversational.
I have to believe there are applications for news here: various correspondents share the latest news on a story, for example. Perhaps this is how we update disaster reports. Perhaps this is how first-responders do, too. Or perhaps this is how we can keep data bases of current inventory and prices of materials. Maybe it has an application in shared reviews. Or maybe I’m getting it wrong.
How do you think SSE could be useful to news?
: Crunchnotes says new companies will be built on the back of SSE.
: LATER: See good discussion in the comments.
: I wonder, also, whether this is one way to handle corrections.
Getting updates, passing along updates, passing along additional sources. checking sources. Most anything you engage in conversations for. Sounds to me like another way to chat/instant message. The next step would be to have multiple channels open via SSE.
I don’t think it’s so much a chat as a collaborative means of keeping information complete or up to date while also informing: dynamic wiki, perhaps, more than chat. But this is why I’m asking, because, as I say, I don’t have my head around it.
Think of it as a drawn out conversation. Hopefully a multi-party conversation as more SSE feeds get involved. I can see SSE compilers starting up, and the current RSS compilers expanding to handle the new medium.
Let me know when you get your first SSE set up and I’ll get one of my own linking to your place.
I was thinking (toward the end of this post) that SSE’s bidirectional nature could allow for some really great community collaboration / filtering in the next-gen news readers. Sort of like memeorandum customized to your OPML reading list and/or a community driven reading list in a wiki format that ties readers together and could allow for some interesting feed-reader technology.
At its core, SSE is about replicating data from one place to another. It just happens to use RSS for it. We think that’s cool because, using SSE, it will be easier to get your data (whether calendars or contacts or whatever) from one machine to another and from one application to another.
I can think of some uses related to news, though most of them are geeky (hopefully others will come up with more interesting scenarios).
Replicate your blog across your devices: I don’t know if this is a problem for you or not, but I’m often working on stuff on different computers (work and home, for instance). If your blogging app used SSE, you could publish from any machine–SSE would keep the two machines synchronized. This would work even if one of your machines was offline at the time (e.g., if you’re on an airplane).
Offline support for Wikis: Wikis are cool because you can collaborate with other people on a single article. But it’s hard to work on a wiki if you’re offline. If wiki software used SSE, it could replicate the wiki database from one machine to another. Thus you could work on the wiki on your laptop while offline. When you reconnected, SSE would replicate your changes to the main wiki database (and vice versa).
Replicating OPML: Winer had the great idea of replicating OPML files with SSE. The advantage is that you can now share your subscription lists across machines and across applications. For example, you can subscribe to a feed at work and your machine at home would also get the subscription.
Distributed wikis could trade updates like articles are propagated on usenet. It would allow the web to be a bit more holographic, rather than being made up of point-sources of information (ie websites).
With a really good mesh of SSE, you could stick your finger into the web and watch as the changes ripple outwards.
What would be the effect of rejecting SSE updates? Differentially, according to various rulesets (or opinions). Local variations in the space-time continuum? A web with virtual curvature.
Too much coffee.
I see a whole new way of collaborating on information creation and distribution, though I’m not sure that Microsoft had all that in mind.
The spec speaks mostly of data syncing applications like calendars, but I love the idea of sharing discussion and news so much that I created an example at http://skinnyfarm.com.
It’s a bit rough, but the first example I’ve seen of what I’m coining “SharedNews” .
[...] I have so much confidence that 2006 will be one of the best years for the web ever. There are so many great things happening. I have no predictions, but I will state where I am looking for innovation. We are on the verge of some great collaborative but distributed services built upon the ability to share information efficiently and in a more meaningful way than links and comments. The combination of a scenario with structured blogging , shared feeds ala Jarvis’ take on SSE, read/write web ala Winer’s OPML editor and citizen journalism ala Dan Gillmor seems to be putting the entire news media business on a precipice. Fall or Fly. Everyone needs to make their own choice. I know mine, so I’ll be announcing some new experiments shortly on the subject of SharedNews , a term I coined describing wiki-like particpation in news feeds. [...]
[...] I’ll remind Jeff about a post he wrote about SSE , and I commented on it. [...]
[...] RSS is going to get even more interesting once two-way feeds gains steam. And what Dave Winer is doing with Newsrivers is brilliant. Digg just launched a diggriver inspired by Dave. There’s no reason there can’t be marketing rivers or ad rivers. For example, what if someone created a master feed of all of the world’s coupon feeds and sorted them by category. It’s still the first inning for RSS marketing. [...]
[...] RSS is going to get even more interesting once two-way feeds gains steam. And what Dave Winer is doing with Newsrivers is brilliant. Digg just launched a diggriver inspired by Dave. There’s no reason there can’t be marketing rivers or ad rivers. For example, what if someone created a master feed of all of the world’s coupon feeds and sorted them by category. It’s still the first inning for RSS marketing. [...]
[...] and its items are a thread of expanding contributions. I’ll be using SSE to help that along. Two-way news is something I’ve been ineterested in for a while, but have yet to hammer [...]