Adam Bosworth on simple web services

Daniel Steinberg reports on Adam Bosworth's talk at the MySQL Users Conference. Adam criticized past efforts on web services as being too complicated and advocated simpler techniques:

Imagine if you can query any data that is available anywhere in the world ... What this requires is a single, simple, open wire format for items. The format needs to be simple for any P programmer to deliver and any JavaScript programmer to consume ... "Complex things tend to break and simple things tend to work."

RSS 2.0 and Atom will be the lingua franca that will be used to consume all data from everywhere. These are simple formats that are sloppily extensible. Anyone who wants to can use these formats to consume content or to author content.

This is our approach at Findory. We designed our RSS feeds as simple, clean, and easy-to-use web services. Programmers can use Findory to get news and weblog content for categories and keyword searches and related content for sources. It's easy and it all just works. Just like the rest of Findory.

[via Dare Obasanjo]