Synchronization with Simple Sharing Extensions

I have come across this Simple Sharing Extensions for RSS and OPML (SSE) specification from Microsoft. It is a minimum extensions necessary to enable loosely-cooperating apps to use RSS as the basis for item sharing – that is, the bi-directional, asynchronous replication of new and changed items amongst two or more cross-subscribed feeds.

This seems to be a great fit for synchronizing the weblib among different repositories. The essence of SSE is a set of items, each has a globally unique id, a timestamp and an increasing version number. This has inspired me to make another revamp to the Weblib file specification to add all those elements. The only remaining issue for me is the globally unique id. I need to figure out a simple way to generate them across distributed systems, (I feel UUID too heavy weight). The implementation is available in SVN, although I haven't updated the specification yet.

Synchronization is a though issue I haven't have it all thought through. But it probably can't go wrong to go with Ray Ozzie who has created Lotus Notes.