May 12, 2008

Oh, the irony of shallow WSDL

I'm looking into the API for the Hi5 social network and unfortunately found some WSDL. They also have a REST API, but it's documentation appears auto-generated from WSDL that nobody actually filled in. Somewhat useless.

Normally I wouldn't post about WSDL, but I couldn't pass up the irony of the WSDL documentation for the authentication service API having an HTML form describing how to authenticate the user. If that's not irony, I don't know what is.

May 09, 2008

Ultimate Twitter revenue model - chatbots??

From ReadWrite Web

"Essentially, this would entail Twitter parsing over the Tweets of a given user, as well as the Tweets of the users he/she is following. Common keywords, themes, and phrases are then pulled from this data and associated with that user. As a result, highly-targeted ads can be displayed based on the user's network of content ("web design", for example). These simple text ads would look very similar to regular Tweets, but would be clearly marked as "Sponsored Content"."



I think chatbots haven't work for a reason - people want to chat not shop.

Reading RWW and other pundit blogs that describe "how the future will work" reminds of reading Popular Science as a kid and gazing in wonder at the flying cars and transparent house soon to be built.

May 06, 2008

Web scale pubsub

Looks like people are now starting to talk about a de-centralized, Web native pubsub system. Now is the time, if applications are going to avoid being based on a single company's service. Too bad pubsub.com and KnowNow aren't driving this.