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Here is an example of one of the risks of tethered applications Zittrain discusses in The Future of the Internet. As posted on the ProgrammableWeb, Google just announced that it will shut down three APIs. The services affected are Jaiku, Dodgeball, and Mashup Editor. The code for Jaiku will be released as open source once the service is discontinued, Dodgeball will terminate without replacement, and Google will promote its AppEngine as replacement for Mashup Editor. While, of course, shutting down APIs is part and parcel of Perpetual Beta, this is a stark reminder that as we are building applications on top of the services of others, the very existence of those applications depends on the continued availability of those services.

Has anyone tried to compare Google trends and the Gartner hype cycle? The hype cycle says that any technology goes through phases of hype and disillusionment, and looks like this:

From Wikipedia article on hype cycle

It seems that overlaying both should be possible. For instance, if you look at the trend for Web 2.0, we can see that the popularity of the term peaked sometime 2007, and is in decline since. Does this correspond to peak of inflated expectations followed by the decent into the trough of disllusionment?

Google Trends for web 2.0

Found a short article on Google trends that suggests to a comparison to the hype cycle model. Seems that the guys from Gartner agree. In the blog on Mastering the Hypecycle, they quote a New Scientist article that traces the uptake of the Chrome browser, and found the shape of the curve to correspond to that of the early part of the hype cycle. Would be interesting to examine this more systematically.

Bug Labs announced five new module for their BUG platform at CES. Two excite me in particular. The BUGprojector is a mini-DLP projector and allows you to project the output of the BUG to a wall. And, finally, a WIFI module is available, which was perhaps the biggest omission from the platform when it was first introduced. Now I am looking forward to getting my hands on one.

The open source statistics package R is quickly advancing to a lingua franca for companies like Google (search) or Pfizer (pharmaceutics) that rely heavily on analytics. Today it made the New York Times.

The original promise of web services was simplicity. Simplicity is the S in SOAP or Simple Open Access Protocol, although nobody calls it that anymore. A bewildering number of WS-* standards has been introduced over the past near decade, causing Tim Bray, Canadian entrepreneur and co-editor of the XML specification, to declare WS-* a failure:

In fact, a recent poll by Information Week found that 58% of IT professionals believed that SOA introduced more complexity [more like 58% of companies dissatisfied with SOA (32% of all companies), but still significant] and resulted in cost overruns. Some industry pundits, such as Tim Bray, echo this sentiment declaring WS-* an embarrassing failure.

The new game in town is REST or REpresentational State Transfer. It proposes a simpler way of defining and accessing web services, based on a combination of HTTP and a payload of ASCII, XML, or JSON. Most importantly, it decouples clients from details of service behavior, and focuses on the data model instead. It offers a clean break from the remote-procedure style of application integration.

REST is thus far simpler than SOAP. REST services are easier to develop and deploy, and accessing a REST service only requires reading from an URL. Companies like Google ditched their SOAP interfaces in favor of a RESTful interface. While supporting SOAP, Amazon has seen a 20% to 80% split between users of its SOAP and REST service interfaces. A REST service provides access to resources identified by URLs. The operations offered by HTTP (PUT, GET, POST, DELETE) provide a uniform way for accessing those resources, and correspond to the familiar CRUD (Create Read Update Delete) operations.

Welcome to the new instantiation of my blog. This blog will track technology and management issues around open source, ecosystems, Web 2.0, and mashups.