Playing With Sharp Objects

Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie spearheads the effort to make RSS work equally between systems for a two-way synchronization. This will be great for getting those PDAs to sync against multiple locations and calendars without duplicate entries killing its usefulness. Contacts, calendar entries - I’ve used them all and at one time or another I’ve had the syncing software screw it up and pollute my lists. The idea of using this like RSS feeds means that each person can have a feed for each category: Vendor Contacts, Family Appointments, Work Dev Notes, etc.

I don’t see security addressed in any of this, though. Ozzie talks about how this needs to stay simple, but by just mentioning “sharing” a real can of worms is opened. How do I keep people from seeing my Family Appointments, and only let my department see the Work Dev Notes?

Worst yet, now that we are talking about having a remote end sync to my info store, we are talking about read/write permissions. In order to stay simple, one must have a user list that is either itself synchronized between sites that plan to share the same permission information, or uses a monolithic user database. Microsoft already has that in .NET, but just mentioning that in some circles is enough to leave a bad taste in some people’s mouths, keeping from being universally adopted across the web.

Check out the feed link below that gets quotes from Yahoo Finance. All financial data is delayed.

In order to use this, create a URL similar to this:

http://www.shokk.com/stock.php?ticker=msft+rhat+virl+ment+sunw+^dji+^ixic

with valid stock symbols separated by plus signs. Stocks are sorted before lookup and a maximum of 10 is allowed in any query. This example link checks the stocks for Microsoft, RedHat, Virage Logic Corporation, Mentor Graphics, Sun Microsystems, the Dow Jones Industrials, and the Nasdaq Composite.

Stop by here to get the complete distribution of Feed On Feed 0.1.9 wth the Reblog patch already integrated plus a new search feature that allows you to match against article titles. No more trying to remember where out of dozens and dozens of feeds you saw an article on a certain topic. This is supported in the frames version only.

Feed On Feeds is a fast, efficient reader for those that seriously use RSS feeds for their information and want to get the most out of their RSS feed management. See the Google Reader article below for more on its wonderful features.

Update 2005-12-03: Added Del.icio.us Playtagger support.
This basically adds the ability for Feed On Feeds to act as a podcasting client for MP3 feeds. If they add AVI/WMV/MOV capability to it, it will also be good for watching RocketBoom episodes.