Wednesday, January 22, 2003

An Explosion of Web Services? As I've been reading and writing today I've come to a somewhat obvious conclusion:  there's been an explosion of 'web services' in the past year, and it has nothing to do with SOAP, WSDL and such standards as described in the industry but with the ascending role of RSS and RDF as XML data and syndication formats. Lots of industry analysts have commented that 'public web services' (e.g. web services that can be accessed and used through Internet-accessible public APIs) haven't really happened.  When one looks at RSS aggregation sites such as Syndic8.com it's quick to see that there are thousands of "web services" out there for people today. Today's count of RSS feeds from Syndic8.com:  10408 feeds Today's count of SOAP APIs from xMethods.com:  275 APIs Granted it is not an entirely fair comparison as SOAP-based web services have a much richer capability --- they are programmatic, they're APIs, they're fully two-way.  It goes to show that the more pragmatic, simplistic APIs seem to get quicker adoption than those that are more rich but perhaps more complex. Additionally, the fact that there are over 10,000 known public RSS feeds says nothing for the economics of these --- the vast majority are niche content from individuals, not rich data feeds that can be applied commercially.  And that's OK. 12:07:52 PM    comment []

Flash MX based UML Modelling Tool Grant Skinner has just launched the beta of one of the sweetest RIAs that I've seen.  GModeler is a programming tool for developers working with ECMA-Script and deriviative languages such as ActionScript and JavaScript.  It's a UML modelling tool built entirely in Flash and supports importing XML exchange formats for UML.  It also does a beautiful job generating HTML documentation and XML content for integration into the Flash MX dev environment directly. It's beautiful, useful, and also a great example of Grant's other pioneering work creating an operating-system style UI shell for Flash applications.     11:35:55 AM    comment []

The Need for RSS Aggregation Web Services Tim Bray has an excellent piece on the challanges that are emerging from the growing popularity of RSS as a content syndication format.  Overall, the growing popularity is supporting trends like micro-content clients and desktop applications that intelligently interact with media and data in the network, rather than the traditional browser-based Internet usage model.   But the big point he raises is that with a move to desktop micro-content clients that talk directly to RSS end-points we loose the portability and server-based nature of Internet applications.  For something like catching-up on news, or even potentially contributing a thought to your own weblog, this is a big issue.   I think there's an opportunity for someone to build a service which is itself purely a RSS aggregation web service, available through SOAP or XML-RPC.  It should include a fairly rich Flash-based client application that can be used from a browser or downloaded to be used locally.  But mostly it would allow people to create their own aggregation lists, and the server-based service would do all the hard-work and scheduled reading/loading.   Since many many users read/view the same RSS source, the service would only need to do it once for many people.  It would preserve my ability to get at my RSS content anytime, anywhere, eliminate network load problems, and provide me with my own user-RSS feed that I could view through their service or with my client tool of choice.   update: Just after posting this I dug around and found a big chunk of what I've described above, which is Syndic8.com, a fabulous uber-aggregation service. Browse around it and it will blow you away.  11:25:03 AM    comment []

Annotating the World Joi Ito has summarized the primary value and essence of moblogging, at least for me.  He states: For instance, if you go to a restaurant, you can push a button and it pulls up all of the interesting things people have written while they were there and threads you to other places those people have been. If you're going to a place, you search for people who have moblogged from that location, finding links to their images and maybe their weblogs. In an "augmented reality" (see my brother-in-law Scott Fisher's work on this. He's actually done a system of using mobile phones to annotate space with content.) sort of way, it's like annotating the real world. That's how I look at it. I'm this little thing crawling around the earth, annotating it with images, sounds and text. You leverage being mobile by being able to add location. This database can be viewed by time/location/ID and we can create meta information from that. (Yes, there are security/privacy issues.) [Joi Ito's Web] The unique value of the content created from a mobile device is it's reference to places and things, which when put in the public domain create network effects and exponential value.  It's a different take on Metcalfe's Law. 11:04:42 AM    comment []