Rodent Regatta

John does an excellent job of building the business case for web services. For years, I’ve been involved in complex application integration projects involving the disparate distribution systems of dealers and distributors. ”Importing” an invoice into the dealer’s software from the distributor’s software when a purchase order was filled and shipped to the dealer was complex and cumbersome.
If I understand what is really happening when an application called Radio ”talks” to an application called Google, then I have to agree with John that Userland is truly on the cutting edge of what the internet can become. This is great stuff:

Desktop webservices and composite applications.  One of the most exciting aspects of desktop webservices is that I can build pages on my desktop that automatically aggregate data from across the web and from webservice enabled corporate applications.  This is effectively a personal portal that could include search (Google) of the Web/LAN/desktop, financial info from a place like Yahoo finance, corporate sales data, corporate financial data, corporate inventory data, news (RSS),  and even data from peer web services (data entered or auto-aggregated by co-workers in a structured format—contact lists, bookmarks, calendar entries, spreadsheets, etc.).
Better yet, I have complete control over the presentation of that data.  With a little programming effort, I can incorporate business rules (with tools that can be automated for me) that do things for me based on that data.   I could also attach a post button to all the data I collect so its easy for me to share it with co-workers via my weblog.  It puts me in control. 
This is the ultimate composite application.  A borg that consumes all others.  I don’t want to learn or interact with hundreds of different websites or application specific clients.  I want it all on my desktop, running in my browser, where I can modify, manipulate, and publish it. [John Robb’s Radio Weblog]

When you put it this way, I can understand it!