There's much excitement around the public web services springing up from big players and not-so-big players alike: Google, Amazon, eBay, PayPal, Salesforce.com, Alexa, Technorati, Flickr, del.icio.us, etc. The possibilities when you string these services together are indeed amazing. Alan Taylor of Kokogiak,and associated with "Amazon Light", an early example of what could be done with Amazon.com's Web Service platform,Erik Benson of erikbenson, associated with 43things.com and allconsuming.net and Cal Henderson of Ludicorp come together to make an oustanding presentation titled web services mash-up. Some of the key tenets outlined include:
•Complementary data is your friend
•Overlaps, Intersections, Keywords, Tags, Categories, etc.
•Use a common "key" to fetch multiple results (technorati tags)
•Chain results together, building on each call (Google Categories -> Flickr tags)
•Add your own information into the mix
Some Considerations to be thought through include:
•Terms of Use, Attribution/credit/licensing
•Acting conservatively (when using others' resources)
•Reliability/Graceful failure (esp. when results are chained)
•Caching (wisdom of and methods of)
•Using RSS as an API, screen-scraping
•Encourage opening up other APIs, make it business-wise.
The presentation is also made available here.
Category: Webservices, Emerging Technologies.
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