Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
Dare Obasanjo and I don’t always agree, but today I agree with him completely when he writes about the tightening of data from web services:
The obvious reaction was to make the Google and del.icio.us announcements into a REST vs. SOAP or XML vs. JSON story since geeks like to turn every business decision into a technology decision. However if you scratch the surface, the one thing that is slowly becoming clear is that providers of data services would rather provide you their data in ways they can explicitly monetize (e.g. driving traffic to their social bookmarking site or showing their search ads) instead of letting you drain their resources for free no matter how much geek cred it gets them in the blogosphere.
The two changes are Google’s closing the SOAP API in favor of a client-based Ajax service, and de.licio.us announcing an Ajax Widget. I participated some at a thread over at Dave Winer’s on this one, and created a simple example pulling the delicious tags for this site, but I think the Google change is the more important one.
I believe we’ll see more web services being pushed to the client in 2007. Fortunately, this opens up a great deal of new functionality to all people, including those using Blogger or other hosted tool.
Unfortunately, we’re going to see it get progressively more difficult to load web pages, with all of the widgets being embedded into the sidebar, such as this absolutely essential one. Good thing we have syndication feeds–might be the only way we’ll be able to read pages in a couple of months.
