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Simple Sharing Extensions

Simple Sharing Extensions

Overview
FeedSync, previously Simple Sharing Extensions, are extensions to RSS
RSS (file format)
RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format...

 and Atom feed formats designed to enable the synchronization of information by using a variety of data sources. Initially developed by Ray Ozzie
Ray Ozzie
Ray Ozzie is Chief Software Architect at Microsoft. He was formerly best known for his role in creating Lotus Notes....

, Chief Software Architect at Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is a multinational computer technology corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices...

, it is now maintained by Jack Ozzie, George Moromisato, Matt Augustine, Paresh Suthar and Steven Lees. Dave Winer
Dave Winer
Dave Winer is an American software developer, entrepreneur and writer in Berkeley, California...

, the designer of the UserLand Software
UserLand Software
UserLand Software is a U.S. software company founded by Dave Winer in 1988. UserLand sells Web content management and blogging software packages and services.-Frontier:...

 RSS specification variants, has given input for the specifications.

The current version is 1.01, which was released on September 15, 2008.
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Encyclopedia
FeedSync, previously Simple Sharing Extensions, are extensions to RSS
RSS (file format)
RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format...

 and Atom feed formats designed to enable the synchronization of information by using a variety of data sources. Initially developed by Ray Ozzie
Ray Ozzie
Ray Ozzie is Chief Software Architect at Microsoft. He was formerly best known for his role in creating Lotus Notes....

, Chief Software Architect at Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is a multinational computer technology corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices...

, it is now maintained by Jack Ozzie, George Moromisato, Matt Augustine, Paresh Suthar and Steven Lees. Dave Winer
Dave Winer
Dave Winer is an American software developer, entrepreneur and writer in Berkeley, California...

, the designer of the UserLand Software
UserLand Software
UserLand Software is a U.S. software company founded by Dave Winer in 1988. UserLand sells Web content management and blogging software packages and services.-Frontier:...

 RSS specification variants, has given input for the specifications.

The current version is 1.01, which was released on September 15, 2008. The 1.0 version was released on December 4, 2007. The differences between the two can be found here.
FeedSync is licensed under the Creative Commons
Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons licenses...

 Attribution-ShareAlike License (version 2.5) and the Microsoft Open Specification Promise
Microsoft Open Specification Promise
The Microsoft Open Specification Promise , is an irrevocable promise by Microsoft, published in September 2006, to not assert legal rights over certain Microsoft patents on implementations of an included list of technologies....

.

The scope of FeedSync for Atom and RSS is to define the minimum extensions necessary to enable loosely-cooperating applications to use Atom and RSS feeds as the basis for item sharing – that is, the bi-directional, asynchronous synchronization of new and changed items amongst two or more cross-subscribed feeds.

Atom feed



xmlns:sx="http://feedsync.org/2007/feedsync">
To Do List
A list of items to do


Ray Ozzie

2005-05-21T11:43:33Z
urn:uuid:60a76c80-d399-11d9-b93C-0003939e0aaa
until="2005-05-23T18:30:02Z" >

title="To Do List (Jacks Copy)" />


Buy groceries
Get milk, eggs, butter and bread
urn:uuid:60a76c80-d399-11d9-b93C-0003939e0aa0

Ray Ozzie

2005-05-21T11:43:33Z







RSS feed





To Do List
A list of items to do
http://example.com/partial.xml
until="2005-05-23T18:30:02Z" >

title="To Do List (Jacks Copy)" />


Buy groceries
Get milk, eggs, butter and bread








Examples of Real World Use


There are several examples of "real world" use of FeedSync feeds to synchronize data between applications.

FeedSync Service


This prototype developer service is an implementation of HTTP based FeedSync endpoint. Applications can use HTTP GET and POST commands to synchronize feeds, where the latter performs the FeedSync merge operation on the feed hosted by the FeedSync Service.

Strong Angel III


FeedSync feeds were used extensively at the Strong Angel III exercise in August 2006 as a lightweight middleware to link applications from Microsoft, Google, ESRI and others on desktops and mobile devices.

ROME project


The comprehensive Java RSS project, ROME, contains an implementation of the FeedSync specification.

Mesh4x


Mesh4x, an open-source set of libraries, tools, applications and services for mesh-based applications, uses FeedSync as the versioning standard, and implements a Feedsync-inspired packet-based protocol to synchronize data over SMS text messages. http://mesh4x.org.

Specifications


Code


Articles