[from Random Jottings]
9:48:52 PM    comment   

Group-forming networks

A few months ago, I wrote a column about the O'Reilly web services and P2P conference in Washington. In the column, I mentioned that Clay Shirky's keynote stressed how the value of group-forming networks (GFNs) rises even faster than what Metcalfe's law suggests. A reader (UserLand's John Robb, actually) wrote to point out that this exponential-growth property of GFNs was discovered and elaborated by David Reed, and is known as Reed's law.

As I watch myself and others use Radio UserLand, and observe what's happening in the blogging world in general, it strikes me that some issues I raised in my book -- particularly about ways of creating overlapping scopes of collaboration -- remain unresolved. I conclude there remains an opportunity to define the requirements for a GFN, and create software that implements those requirements.

I wonder what people would list as requirements for a GFN? Mine include:

• Ability for users (not administrators) to create multiple overlapping collaborative scopes.

• Scoped services -- e.g. partitioned search, referral analysis, ranking.

• An easily-adjustable boundary between public and private spaces.

• Ability to migrate content and discussion among partitions.

9:20:56 PM    comment   

SOAP's work/reward ratio

Kevin Altis is collecting WSDL verifiers and SOAP endpoint invokers. "Quite frankly," he says, "using SOAP and WSDL feels like work."

That's partly due to the tools-and-interop situation, which as Kevin notes, is rapidly improving. Mainly, though, it just is a lot of work to deploy all this machinery in order to call yet another stock-quote or celsius-to-fahrenheit gizmo that returns one lonely little value swaddled in layers of XML. It's not just tools-and-interop holding back the flood of interesting services that we all envision. What makes services interesting is data that's interesting. Some creators/gatherers of interesting data will wrap high-quality APIs around it just for fun. But for others, maybe most others, it'll have to be a business.

9:19:09 PM    comment   

A Busy Developers Guide to WSDL 1.1 [Sam Ruby's Radio Weblog] Thanks, Sam! Far and away the most grokkable explanation I've seen.

9:16:43 PM    comment   

Interview: David Brin's Naked Truth About Privacy 

Terrific interview with one of the most thoughtful and iconoclastic thinkers on the subject of privacy. Brin's book, The Transparent Society, the first chapter of which of appeared in Wired, rocked me when read it, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since. Some of those thoughts went into a column.  Looking back on it reminds me what a confusing thicket of issues we're trying to hack our way through.

You have no privacy. Get over it.
6:58:02 PM    comment   

Ars Technica: What is .NET?

The "unassailable computing enthusiasts" at Ars Technica deliver consistently deep and clueful technology write-ups. Here's their take on .NET.

6:57:06 PM    comment