Web Services sweeping the landscape

This is a repost from 1000 Flowers Bloom that I thought would be interesting to this audience:

There's an interesting discussion going on around Web Service components. Are they Internet Connected Compenents as Scoble is calling them? Maybe Raw Potatoes as Ethan Stock and I have mused about? You know - the things you make mashups out of.

No matter what you name them they are changing the way that functionality is shared and distributed around the web. Why do a mapping component when Google will do it for you? Why write a music engine when Yahoo will do it for you? Entrepreneurs should be building on top of these to create great apps.

Zvents is a great example of this. Take a core idea like - we need to have a good way to find all the events that are out there and then layer functionality like Google Maps on top of it to make it better.

I had an interesting conversation today with Greg Isaacs over at eBay and he's got some cool examples of the eBay APIs being used with things like Google Maps functionality. They put out a call at their last developers conference for more functionality like this and it looks like their developers have delivered. He showed me some truly cool stuff when I talked to him. I'll be posting the interview next week.

The real question in my mind is - what are the components? What should they be? I created a wiki over at wsfinder to help answer that question. One thing that's fascinating is to see which areas have lots of APIs from different providers and which don't... but that's fodder for another post.

Chris

Comments

[Paul]

Nice reference to Zvents. What do you think of their indexing the web to ensure comprehensiveness; unlike the stunted databases of the sites that depend on user submission?