Sharing to be made easier

Dave Winer (emphasis mine):

The next development project is a connection between NewsRiver and the Share Your OPML community server. I’ve written code that allows you to set up NewsRiver to automatically ping SYO when your subscriptions change. Of course, by default, this feature is turned off; and it’s open, any aggregator will be able to connect its users to the SYO system in exactly this way.

That’s exactly what I was hoping for. Allow aggregators and other apps to upload subscription lists, so you get information from people who don’t have the time/knowledge/desire to export and import their OPML, or the organizational skills to keep it updated.

If, for instance, FeedDemon had a checkbox in its Folder Properties to synchronize to SYO and another one to share that list, then for my “Favorite Feeds” folder I would leave both checked and forget about it.

And for those who don’t even read feeds, if WordPress had the option to upload its Lists (discovering the feeds before submitting), then bloggers could upload their blogrolls. Maybe there are other applications that would also like to play? del.icio.us, perhaps?

I guess I should have known that Winer of all people would want to make this open and “scriptable”.

Of course (he said, quickly hurdling the fence), broadening the scope of what would be uploaded changes the meaning of the aggregate data. If lists of tagged sites and blogrolls get included, then I can no longer get a quick count of the number of people subscribing to my feed. Unless, of course, the “type” attribute on the “outline” elements were used to distinguish these different sorts of lists (type=”link”?). Not sure yet whether that’s an “ah-ha!” or a gag reflex.