Wednesday, January 23, 2002

How GPS Gets the Taxi to You Faster This is an excellent use of technology to add real customer value. It's almost refreshing to see with all the other value stealing uses of technology that have been popping up lately. 8:50:26 AM     Pressplay Arrives in Music Fog. [Wired News] Start the count down, this is an idea that is completely doom ed. It costs more money for less quality, restricted use, and a recurring fee. You subscribe for N downloads per month, but those don't roll over and if you stop subscribing you not only lose the ability to download more, but you also can't play the music you already have. Are they out of their mind? What ever happened to providing value to the customer? Oh yeah, once the service fails you won't even be able to listen to the music you already paid for either. What a splendid value! The greed in the music industry is absolutely sickening! 6:32:11 AM     Macs in abundance at last week's NAMM show [MacCentral] 6:09:54 AM     This looks like a much more useful way to find web services. Even has little orange XML buttons to get the RSS feeds. None of this stuff is kosher from a big business perspective, but at least there's something useful there today. 3:22:55 AM     More on the uselessness of UDDI. The UDDI weather report. Only 43% of the records in the UDDI directory could be proven to be correct and actually available. 3:12:05 AM     Lately I've been thinking a lot about web services and how they can be integrated with the desktop experience. As part of this I decided it was time to give UDDI another look. I read the early specs when UDDI was first announced, decided it was a waste of time and pretty much ignored it since. So I figured since UDDI is still all over the place in discussions of web services I needed to give it another look to see what I'm missing. Well, I just don't get it. UDDI is still the most useless spec I've ever seen. I tried searching around the Microsoft UDDI server to find web services and I couldn't find anything. The default search is to search on business name, if I knew the business name why do I need UDDI? I'll just go to the business directly and find out what services it offers. The advanced search is just as useless, it offers to let you search by all kinds of stuff that is completely meaningless to me. Where's the option to just type in some keywords and search for a spell checker web service, or a hosting company that provides a SOAP API for publishing, or anything useful at all? Here's what you can search on. Business name | Business location | tModel by name | Business identifier | Discovery URL | GeoWeb Taxonomy | NAICS codes | SIC codes | UNSSPC codes | ISO 3166 Geographic Taxonomy | RealNames Keyword How are any of those things useful to me for finding a web service? RealNames keyword is the closest, but even that is worthless because of the fact it is tied to RealNames not just any keyword. It seems like you have to already know an awful lot of detail about what you're looking for. I'd think Google is a better way to find web services, at least there I could type "spell checker SOAP web service" and probably find what I want. Well, yes of course you can. UDDI still seems to be the biggest waste of time I've ever seen. In fact Microsoft and IBM, the creators of UDDI, seem to be thinking the same thing. Oops, just read the FAQ. "In general, UDDI can locate businesses whose identity you know already so that you can find out what services they are offering and how to interface with them electronically". Guess I was right UDDI really is worthless. If I already know the business why don't I just ask the business? Who thinks this is a good and necessary idea? 2:36:43 AM

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