Google Reader was where I spent most of my browsing time, but now, it’s shutting down. Time for alternatives, but not just for Reader: for all Google products. I’m not sure when one of these might go down, become paid, or become unusable. I just uninstalled Google Drive and Google Talk. but I don’t use it much (I use Skype), so no loss. I’ll leave Chrome for the while, but I’m hearing reports that Firefox is improving faster than Chrome is. Or there’s Chromium. ...
Google Related Links. Google’s following Yahoo’s lead in Y!Q.
The ultimate irony. Amazon has written an API that invokes humans. Amazon Mechanical Turk provides a web services API for computers to integrate Artificial Artificial Intelligence directly into their processing by making requests of humans. Developers use the Amazon Mechanical Turk web services API to submit tasks to the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site, approve completed tasks, and incorporate the answers into their software applications. To the application, the transaction looks very much like any remote procedure call - the application sends the request, and the service returns the results. In reality, a network of humans fuels this Artificial Artificial Intelligence by coming to the web site, searching for and completing tasks, and receiving payment for their work. ...
Yahoo! Next. It’s a showcase of some of Yahoo!’s newest and coolest projects. Like Google Labs.
Daypop is out of disk space. Poor thing! Could we lend it some? I mean, could sites like Daypop work out a distributed architecture, using web services? Or using things like space drives? via Scripting News
Publicly available web services from xmethods.
Google has released a Beta API. Programmers, please do something with it. I honestly wish I had the time to use it, too!
The Economist suggests that just as focus of the computer industry shifted from hardware to software, it is now shifting from software to online services. Which means that the computer (hardware and software) will commoditize and only web services will make money.
Finance.com has shut down. Desktop.com too. NetZero. And the biggest of all: Pets.com (chart). This is more the trend than exception. People who had accounts on these? Tough luck! That’s one reason to stick to big players like Yahoo or Microsoft.