Comments on: Our current biggest online revolution isn’t user facing…

By: Tom

Tom — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 18:35:08 +0000

I get as excited about APIs as anybody, but I think it’s a stretch to say that they’re now more important than sites. Sure, they can be an important part of businesses like Twitter and Flickr, but we’ve been hearing that the future is web services for at least five years, when SOAP became a W3C recommendation (and of course XMLRPC generated a wave of hype before that).

But the truth is that very few businesses make their money from running subscription web services, and adoption rates for RSS remain pretty low. I agree that this stuff is important and exciting — but these technologies have all been around for at least half a decade.

It’s silly for the tech industry to perpetually insist that something new and exciting is happening *right now* — it shouldn’t be necessary! And it makes conferences like SXSW get more irrelevant by the year, as the quest for novelty leads people to hype things that aren’t really worth the effort.

By: Greg Rollett

Greg Rollett — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 13:49:57 +0000

Justin,

Seeing everything that is happening and how people are bringing the web to themselves has been very fascinating, encouraging and hard to consume for the average joe. When everything is put back together, my hopes is that it will be beneficial to everyone using the web and not just the tech savvy.

But with the work of everyone at FOWA and the developments we talked about in Miami, there is hope and many great non-sexy developments happening around us right now!

By: Josh Babetski

Josh Babetski — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 13:30:15 +0000

Great post Justin! “Shiny objects” are easy to talk about, but it’s usually the “dull” features and functionality which provide the most usefulness and value.

@Brian: Concur, I hope we’re all the ones putting the “tiny bits” together in new and exciting combinations.

By: Andrew Hyde

Andrew Hyde — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 03:13:21 +0000

spot on.

By: Brian Wynne Williams

Brian Wynne Williams — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 02:56:14 +0000

First, I agree that there’s lots of innovation happening. It’s in smaller bits — which can sometimes seem (and be) repetitive — but it’s happening at an astounding rate.

Second, the question of who will pull the tiny bits together is an important one. Hopefully it won’t have to be one company but rather enough agreements & standards that we can all help pull it all together just by playing along.