Web services? Trying to come up with applications that new web service standards will enable (that can't be done today) has bothered me for over a year now. I can't think of any... not a single service that can't be fixed with today's technology!

• Connect Yahoo! Mail to Netscape Calendar to render the list of emails in a calendar interface
• or get an alert via Lifeminders when your PayPal account balance is below a hundred dollars
• or something...

It's not hard to fix. Connecting services like that is really not hard to fix yet no one does it! Do you know why? I do. It's because those services don't offer us much value. If they did, someone would go through the trouble of implementing them with some old, scrappy tool like Perl or VB or maybe even C++. Imagine.
Will people suddenly start doing it when SOAP is a standard? No. We'll connect those services but not just with some fancy web services tekniko cardinale. We'll stitch the stuff together the way we always do, with some imagination and a couple of lines of code. Of course we'll use XML-RPC, SOAP, .NET but they'll just be small parts of the the huge web that's already there. And people won't use those services unless they offer us some real value. So the web will grow and evolve and as users we'll be blessed with more stuff like Google and Amazon:-)

B