Nowdays there’s a big discussion is open about what is required to be added to the OPML standard and how it should be updated to cover most of today’s needs of feed aggregators, messangers and other OPML consumers and producers of all kinds. The community is actively discussing possible applications and required attributes to be added here and there to cover them. That is what I call “a lot of fun” when expressing my point of view on Open Standards.

As you might know, BlogBridge is an active user of OPML. We use it for internal data interchange between the client and the service as well as we have some OPML import functions which are liberal enough to understand even the worst samples of human-made outlines. So, if we do pretty good with all that, what else do we need for the full happiness?

We are always looking for the ways to collaborate. We are constantly improving our services and application functions by adding more and more features other online services provide. For all this come true the strictly-defined and reliable Open Standards are required in order to make the data echange as simple and flexible as reasonable. The whole network could have easily got into a mess and disorder, if everyone have used their own standards and formats for data publishing and exchange. In this worst case we could barely dream about any collaboration and evolution, in broader sense.

There are number of innovations, like Reading and Attention Lists, which are currently in focus and under heavy discussions net-wide. We have a glimmer of hope that even though we and our interests are so different, we still have very good chances to find a compromise and design really flexible and simple outline format.

Jumping into the discussion, here’s the summary of the OPML format we use in BlogBridge.

Let us and other know what you think! It’s the right time.