Okay. You keep blogging things that seem awfully interesting and/or important. And yet, I never click on those links. I think this is because I don't have the history.



What is it, exactly, that's going on? I need a primer.

What's going on in general? Or what's going on with web services?



I shouldn't be so flip about the future of web services, as I'm not in a position to know what the current status actually is. It just seems like we've been talking about public XML-based web services for a long time. Blogger has an XML-RPC interface for apps to work with weblogs. Google has a SOAP interface for apps to perform Google searches and get the results in a usable data structure. There's some Instant Messaging infrastructure that's genuinely interesting, as mentioned in this article. I like the idea that current uses of web spiders (computer programs using interfaces intended for humans) indicate a future market for web services, but that doesn't mean those services are going to happen. I was mostly amused at O'Reilly's own example of spidering Amazon because it sounds like they'd like an API instead. :)

Matt links this SFGate article on what web services are, and (for no reason directly related to content in that article) it dawns on me that BlogTracker is an example of the value of web services, and a powerful one, at that. BlogTracker queries Weblogs.com for data on when various weblogs were last updated. Weblogs.com gets its data from the weblogs themselves, also through a web servicey interface. Duh.



Nevermind, the future is here.