As presaged by Dave Winer yesterday and announced by him today, Ray Ozzie, now at Microsoft, has introduced Simple Sharing Extensions as a new XML nameSpace using RSS and OPML to allow lists of items, and outlines to interactively exchange their information. Marc Canter also hinted at this development in his guest piece for the AlwaysOn Network "Breaking the Web Wide Open".

I believe that this is going to be a tremendously important development, on several levels.

• It does more to validate Microsofts new software as a service agenda, and demonstrates more about open standards and open APIs than the previous Microsoft demos; as much because of the use of a CreativeCommons license as for opening up synchronization among disparate applications and services like calendar, contacts, events, reading lists, and more, and so much more.
• Though that is secondary to the impact this will have on bringing many of the promises of Web 2.0 to fruition.
• The adoption of the SSE standard will allow the realization of personal Identity management and AttentionTrust.
• We'll see new levels of groupware and enabling of distributed workgroups.
• This is one more, and very powerful, piece of the puzzle to enable the TeleInterActive Lifestyle™
• We're all going to have a lot of fun with this.

You can also find more information in the SSE FAQ. Don Dodge has a well-writtne piece on SSE. There's an interesting preview on the AttentionTrust Blog, as well.

Update: Mike Arrington says

"New companies will be built on the back of SSE."
-- Michael Arrington "COOL - SSE turns RSS bidirectional"

Update 2: Alex Barnett has a good list of reactions to the SSE in his post, "Microsoft proposal: Simple Sharing Extensions for RSS and OPML".

As Miss Rogue points out, the blogoshpere is abuzz about gada.be, the search aggregator, primarily for mobile devices, but available from any platform, that uses RSS and outputs through OPML. So much so, that you can't get to the site.

We started getting referrer stats from opml.gada.be yesterday, and, as I mentioned in a comment to Gee-Gada.be, I could get to that URL, but no other.

I finally got through to teleinteractive.gada.be [hey, this is all about hubris after all]. The results were all about, well, us. Except for one for teleinteractive audio by Rohr Post. There were no results on CASTLE - Computer Aided System for
Teleinteractive Learning in Environmental Monitoring, which surprised me.

Gada.Be looks like an interesting system. Though I've never have had trouble using search tools on my Palm via Bluetooth to my mobile to the Web. But having searches from multiple engines as RSS feeds into my aggregators is really cool.

The emergence of podcasting shown by Brian Livingston in "RSS Readers: Narrowing Down Your Choices" is striking. Brian uses statistics from FeedBurner.com and discovers that iTunes has already jumped to 9.53% of the aggregator market, putting it in the top 5 of feed wiki(List_of_news_aggregators,readers) used. I find this amazing because iTunes is really only usefull to subscribe to RSS feeds for podcasts, not for text based news or blogs as other aggregators. Also, other podscast only feed readers like iPodder [7.17%] and iPodderX [1.77%] are in the top 20. Podcasting has been growing much faster than blogging. RSS and RDF syndication has been around since the mid to late 1990's, and the first web logs started around the same time, but they didn't take off until the most recent U.S.A presidential election. Podcasting has been around for only a couple of years, and it has fewer providers [40,000 to 50,000 current estimates] then the estimated 10 million bloggers, but I would guess from the statistics presented by Brian that nearly as many people subscribe to podcasts as subscribe to syndicated feeds for news and blogs.

BTW, I realize that I've used various terms for the same thing, feed readers, RSS Aggregators, etc, all describe online services or plug-ins for web browsers or email clients and stand alone clients that read OPML allowing you to follow news, blogs, podcasts and other frequently updated web content using XML based technologies: RSSv1, RSSv2 and Atom.

Found via: Dan Gillmor in RSS Aggregators: Some Statistics

You can also find more information and other articles on aggregators on this blog by following this link. BTW, many of the aggregators listed are open source projects. I was disappointed to see that our favourite, RSSowl didn't make the the top 20 list.