He survived a helicopter crash back in 2003 and laughs about it now. Instead of ignoring Tim O’Reilly and other critics during the Amazon 1-Click patent controversy in 2000, he joined the conversation and spearheaded the movement for patent reform. He’s a big fan of science fiction. He can talk to you about web services […]
Tag: Web Services
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The Year of the Widget
I’ve mentioned my love of widgets in passing, but thought they deserved a little more attention. If you’ve ever used Apple’s Dashboard, the customizable Google Homepage, the Yahoo! Widget Engine, or Windows Vista’s Gadgets, you’re familiar with the idea. If you haven’t tried any of these, widgets are little, single purpose “applications” (if you can […]
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RESTing the Geeky Way
Update on 11/30/2006 @ 1pm: I fixed an error below where I should have said Roy Fielding instead of Ray. Thanks Mark Baker! Although I haven’t had much time for leisure reading lately, I have taken a few minutes here and there to study up on a little something called Representational State Transfer, usually referred […]
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Thinking About Software and Lock-in
I was just thinking about my recent switch from Bloglines to Google Reader. It was easy – really easy. Export an OPML file of my RSS feeds from one, import it into the other. I made the transition in less than a minute. So, what does this mean for Bloglines? Should Ask make it painful […]
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The Salesforce Blitzkrieg
I really like Salesforce.com, not just because it makes good products, but because it’s at the forefront of providing business software as a service over the internet. The company has moved from simply providing customer relationship management (CRM) software, to becoming a credible on-demand alternative to traditional business applications hosted on-site. Last year, Salesforce introduced […]
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Bloglines vs. Google Reader
When Google announced their web-based RSS reader called Google Reader at the Web 2.0 Conference last October, I took a quick look, but I honestly wan’t that impressed. I imported my list of subscribed RSS feeds and gave it a try, but it was really, really slow and buggy, living up to its “beta” label. […]
Update @ 2:45pm: Jon Udell has a quick word on EC2, complete with a screencast demo. His one word review: “Wow”. Like Chris Pirillo, I received an email from Amazon last night inviting me to try out the beta of Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), their newest web service offering. Here, I’m going to tell you […]
Have you ever heard of Amazon S3? It’s the company’s Simple Storage Service that lets you use its computing infrastructure for your own purposes. Ok, that’s pretty cool, but here’s what makes it what they like to call a “game changer”: It’s all you can eat data storage with no upfront costs and no minimum […]
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Loving Google Calendar
I’ve been using Google Calendar since it was released last month, and I have to say that its completely awesome. I had been using the 30 Boxes beta for a couple of months, but it just can’t compete with gCal. 30 Boxes had promise, but I predict it’ll vanish quickly now because of Google. Why […]
Earlier today, I was reminded of Jon Udell’s amazing LibraryLookup Project after he posted a new blog entry where he published some Python code for it. What it does is simple, yet very useful. If you’re browsing Amazon or some other page containing a book’s ISBN number, you can click a JavaScript bookmarklet which will […]