Web Serice and Mashup Pros and Cons and the First Google Clone

Dietrich Kappe, Thursday, September 28, 2006 @ 10:46 pm

Over at Web Directions South, a good collection of pros and cons regarding web services and mashups from Kevin Yanks and Cameron Adams. Some choice things from the list

• Having an API allows external programmers to access your data in a smart way. Page scraping is so Web 1.0
• Programmableweb.com acts as an encyclopaedia of what APIs are available and what people are doing with them.
• The amount of data mining capable through APIs is potentially frightening; especially if you're the paranoid type.
• It's not all about maps - TagTV, Viral Video Chart, BlueOrganizer, Salesforce Adwords.
• Cross Domain AJAX is a security risk that has come along for the ride. You can load images, CSS and JavaScript from other domains, but cannot load HTML or XML. JSON-P gets around this by disguising the new data as JavaScript. The potential problem here is that your data provider could very easily inject malicious script if they wanted to. JSON-P only supports GET requests and fails silently if you get the API URL wrong.

One thing I was not aware of was that a company down under -- ZoomIn -- is providing a google maps-like interface. I guess google maps for New Zealand and Australia leave something to be desired, leaving an opening to an upstart that looks a lot like google maps. You can include maps on your site, and the Javascript API looks just like the Google one.

What does this all mean? It means that in Australia and New Zealand if you don't like google or it's terms of service, you can use an equivalent service with a minimal change. Is this the future of online services, or are we about to see a raft of API lawsuits? Hard to say.

 
  Technorati : google clone, mashups, soa

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Comments: 1 so far

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1. 

   The link to my notes for Kevin and Cameron’s presentation on the Web Directions site is 404 because I changed the permalink to correct a typo in Kevin’s name. Sorry about that!

   Comment by Andrew K., Saturday, September 30, 2006 @ 9:48 pm

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