With Doppler, and basically all software you use at more locations, it could be nice to sync your current ’state’ between the various locations where you use that software.

I’ve been thinking (and actually did some coding for it too) to come up with something for Doppler myself (but generic enough to have other people hook into it) however, lack of funding stopped me continuing that effort (any investors reading this?). I simply cannot afford building up the rather huge server environment that would be needed to allow the around 300.000 Doppler users to sync their feed subscriptions.

I’m currently looking into implementing NewsGator synchronization for the ‘big’ Doppler (the small Doppler, DopplerMobile, supports NewsGator already), however, Attensa also seems to come up with an interesting API, Microsoft supports RSS in Outlook 12 and connects to their Exchange server and Google also announced a sync API (when you search Robert Scoble’s blog for ‘sync’ you get a nice overview of the current sync offerings for RSS tools)

Makes you wonder, when is Microsoft announcing something?
To me it sounds like something that would very well fit into their ‘live.com’ strategy. Something like ’sync.live.com’ where any developer could hook into.

Make a developer register for a ‘key’ or a ‘token’ (that’s how NewsGator calls it) and have a user specify their MS Passport username and password in your tool. The moment you have that data a relatively simple API (SOAP based?) could allow you to store XML data on the sync server which you can retrieve at the other instances and do you thing with it. Issues come to mind what could happen if another tool starts to use your token and corrupt your data, but I guess that’s the case nowadays anyway with the current synchronisation API’s too. Privacy and security issues come to mind, but that’s all something we could solve. In the end it’s you, the end user, who decides -if- you want to sync. Don’t want to sync? Don’t provide your username and password. Simple as that.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a -generic- sync server? Not one connected to specific data like RSS or OPML, but one where you can store just any XML you want to store? (I’m focussing on XML right now as that seems to be a nice format for the backend to store, there is no conversion needed from binary to whatever backend storage system it’s using, if you do want to store binary data, encode it in base64 or whatever and wrap it in XML).

Wouldn’t it be great that have that functionality around? How many of you try to keep your bookmarks in sync between a PC at work and a PC at home? Many of you I guess. Of course there are specific sync tools out there for that solution, but those usually require to be able to ’see’ the other instance, it’s a bit like peer 2 peer. With a generic sync server hosted at a company big enough to ensure close to 100% availability that could be the ideal way to store your bookmark and make sure your bookmarks stay in sync. Or your email, or your RSS feeds, or your podcasts, or what the heck, even your windows background image!

Storage space shouldn’t be a problem, now that Google allows you to store more than 2 Gb in your mailbox.

Or am I describing the Google Grid now…?