Friday, October 7, 2005

Something interesting is happening...

...on the Internet.

Duh.

Specifically I'm talking about a lot of really cool customizable services and applications happening through a combination of technologies like Ajax combined with peer/friend/blogger matching and/or communication.

The result start with apps that are customizable by users (e.g. I use www.start.com as my homepage now), but quickly get to mor compelling areas like customizable search, peer-customized search, peer-matchmaking-and-adjusted-search, etc.

Check out:

for a couple interesting examples. (Thanks to Charles and Adam for pointers to the above).

I might just be getting more exposure to these things now, but maybe not. It feels like the rate at which these are popping up is snowballing, and that it's no longer the complexity of linking them together (thanks to the whole web services arena), but the idea of linking the right ones togehter in the right way.

Sandip, if you are reading, you need to go find Dean and give him a great big whopping "I told you so!" :-)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

That stumbleupon looks pretty cool, I'll have to try it out later.

I don't really care for the start.com as a homepage though because I use a custom webpage that contains a few search engine forms and a lot of my commonly used links. That way I don't have any external slow loading page when I create a new browser window.

I still need to find one of those movie peer/friend/matching sites that I read about a long time ago and can't seem to find anymore.

Anonymous said...

Bah! I see no indication that either of those sites used "Web Services". They're just good ideas implemented with available tools :-)

KimPallister said...

From Wikipedia:
"a Web service is a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network."

Yahoo exposes their search engine in such a manner, and allows for others to build web-based applications that call into other services. I can't seen why this isn't an example.

Google and MSN offer similar API's into their searches. e.g.:

http://www.google.com/apis/api_faq.html#gen1

They communicate via SOAP, in WSDL format. Hmm... I seem to remember someone else using those acronyms... could it have been..... SANDIP?!?!