What's That Noise?! [Ian Kallen's Weblog]

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20041008 Friday October 08, 2004

Who is the Master of Puppets? Could this be a picture of a wired George Bush on Salon.com?

See for yourself, Bush's mystery bulge I hope Kerry brings it up in tonight's debate, may be pat him down.

Master of Puppets

I will occupy
I will help you die
I will run through you
Now I rule you too

Come crawling faster
obey your Master
your life burns faster
obey your Master
Master
Master of Puppets I'm pulling your strings
- Metallica, 1986

( Oct 08 2004, 11:49:12 AM PDT ) Permalink


Interfaces and wire protocols for web services A lot of great feedback emerge during and after the Technorati hackathon.

The hackathon percolated a lot of interesting ideas. One of the bits of feedback that caught my attention was from Chris Fry:

There are some drawbacks however to not having a WSDL and to not using SOAP. (1) You are bound to HTTP; (2) If you version the contract how do you notify your clients? (3) Related to 1, no SOAP Headers; (4) No public contract other than your documentation.

This sounds great, getting Technorati developers out of the wire-protocol-awareness business (unless they want to be in it) is one of my goals for future development efforts with the Technorati API. The direction I'd like to take it is an "all of the above" implementation where API consumers can fiddle with the low level if they want to (via REST w/XML, REST w/XOXO, xml-rpc or whatever interface to du jour is desired) but also provide a SOAP interface for those who want to use WSDL to skip all of that.

We have some work to do internally at Technorati to get us to that point though.

( Oct 08 2004, 10:58:31 AM PDT ) Permalink


Google's Velocity Accelerating If you measure development velocity as the number of funcitonality points per time interval, then Google is definitely accelerating.

Check it out:

Gmail Atom Feed Coming?
According to internetnews.com, Google is enabling feeds of gmail mailboxes to make feed readers lightweight mail clients (well, readonly clients). I'm imagining subscribing to mailing list digests through gmail and reading them through a feed reader will become an adopted practice. Additionally, gmail's search capabilities are getting some augmentation.
Google Searches Books: Google Print
As has been widely publicized, Google Print seems to be Google's response to A9 ...so far Google Print has been down half the time I've tried to use it but I wouldn't bet against them executing well on it.
Google queryable via SMS
I'm imagining all kinds of goodness out of this... querying Froogle for prices while you're shopping bricks-n-mortar venues, looking up local bars and restaurants (and Dodgeballing them!)
Gbrowser
John Doerr says that he doesn't see browser in Google's future but still, if it quacks like a browser builder, it's probably a browser building duck.

So what's next from Google? An Orkut that isn't all-Brazil-all-the-time?

( Oct 08 2004, 10:31:29 AM PDT ) Permalink