A few weeks ago, Yahoo announced its support of wildcards in robots.txt. This week, Google, Yahoo, and MSN all agreed on a standard for sitemaps. I don't think this a coincidence of events. Rather, I believe it is an indication of a trend — that search engine vendors see a value in collaborating on certain issues. Other similar examples that come to mind are NavTeQ and TeleAtlas's agreement to use a standard protocol for traffic information in navigation systems. It's just a win-win situation for everyone.
The standard looks a lot like Google's XML-based standard. This does not surprise me, as the Yahoo! standard was much simpler and lacked some useful features provided by Google. Microsoft previously did not have a standard.
Microsoft says it will be implemented by 2007. Yahoo!, and of course Google, already have it implemented.
What does this mean for you? Less work and potentially better spidering. What does this mean for me?
I need to update my seo book now 
You can see the standard over here: http://www.sitemaps.org/.
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http://www.sitebases.org XML SiteMap Becomes Standard - Charlotte Web Design and SEO Services[...] November keith.schilling07:02 amAdd comment Several of our SEO Gurus ( Bruce Clay,ProBlogger, and Jaime Sirovich) are reporting that Google, MSN, and Yahoo have all decided to use XML Sitemaps as the standard for your websites sitemaps. I think this is an excellent idea as long as they actually use them! [...] SEO Egghead by Jaimie Sirovich » Sitemaps Standard Still Non-Functional[...] I was all excited about the sitemaps standard when I first heard about it. The catch is, it's not clear when everyone will support it. This URL indicates that the following URL-template: [...]
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