Friday Roundup

I've got a bunch of cool stuff queued up, so here goes:

• Over at TechCrunch, Mozes (powered by ECS) got a nice writeup. There's even more at MobileCrunch.

   
• The Top Sites List uses the Alexa Web Information Service to report on top sites globally, and per-country.

   
• Tic-Tap Web Search is new and cool. It mashes up ECS and a Yahoo API to provide highly relevant ads featuring Amazon content. There's also a very nice popup "detail page" for each advertised item. Amusingly enough, searching for "web services" will return version 3 of ECS as a product!

   
• ImageWalker reviewed my Mix06 presentation on the Mechanical Turk.

   
• Richard Wallis talks about two valuable properties of web services: standardization (or Lego-ness, as he calls it) and ease of consumption (Toys R Us - ness). Both are crucial. The developers that I talk to want to get something up and running quickly, they want to use as many of their existing skills as possible, and they don't want to have to spend a lot of time learning about proprietary things that won't be of long term, cross-service benefit to them.

   
• Web services and Ajax go together like peanut butter and chocolate, and I've been following developments in the Ajax world pretty closely. A couple of great resources in this area are the Ajaxian blog, Ajax Magazine, and Dion Hincliffe's writings on the Sphere of Influence blog. Dion's most recent articles include State of Ajax, The Incredible Ongoing Story of Ajax, and The Ajax Spectrum. If that's not enough, Michael Mahemoff of the Software as She's Developed blog has done a very nice series of Ajax podcasts.

That just about does it for today. If you have something cool and relevant to this blog, please tell me about it! Send me some email, or leave a comment on this post.

-- Jeff;