AJAX has been great for the services community. By adding asynchrony it's possible to build services that can retrieve data in the background and remain interactive with the user. This is not only great for building more powerful service interfaces but it also provides us with a critical tool in defeating latency by allowing for services to be built out of other services down on the client instead of having to mash things up on the server. I suppose life would be good then if it weren't for one tiny problem – writing code in AJAX sucks. It is, I believe, time to move beyond Javascript to a byte code environment and beyond XML to a data language that can be reasonably versioned and is truly performant.
Windows Live – It's About Services (or maybe ads)
Sigh…. I know… I know… Microsoft… evil… proprietary… no cross platform… Windows über alles… etc. Whatever. Look folks, this is really easy. I work for Windows Live and my mission as handed to me by my boss, his boss and his boss's boss is simple – Make money on services.
Why I Won't Fly American Airlines
I work hard to keep both junk mail and identity hijacking opportunities (you can't really steal someone's identity so I don't like the term identity theft) out of my mailbox. So you can imagine my surprise, especially after signing up at https://www.optoutprescreen.com/, that I got a credit card offer in the mail.
Yahoo Shopping Officially Becomes Useless
My first stop when I am in the mood for comparison shopping is Yahoo's shopping page. They have a huge selection of stores and a good rating system. But when I went today looking for ink cartridges I noticed something that renders Yahoo Shopping completely useless – it no longer appears to be possible to order search results by price. You can 'refine' your search by price and essentially implement your own bounds search but that is a huge waste of my time. They actually crippled their own site! I hate it when a good site goes stupid. I guess I'll have to us my backup sites.