Software, Digital Content, Geopolitics, Economics & More from of a Libertarian Serial Expat and Entrepreneur
This API status meta dashboard is great, as it scratches an itch I’ve had for almost a decade. I meant to suggest to the Zapier folks that they develop exactly that, but didn’t end up sharing that thought, and here they are! Brilliant team, excellent product. Now they need to customize the datatable and RSS feed [...]
September 2010 necro-update: How things have evolved through the last decade! There’s now api-status.com to get the pulse of dozens of public APIs. You read it here first as per this entry originally from 2004. People who use the Amazon.com web services routinely complain about their sluggishness. In the dedicated discussion board, after someone suggested [...]
In: web services
11 Jan 2008We’ve been working in the Paypal sandbox and Authorize.net test account lately and neither really feel like the real thing. Paypal’s sandbox is slow as molasses, among other very irritating foibles. Testers need to login separately in the sandbox, while this really should be done through code and be transparent to the users testing the [...]
In: web services
21 May 2007I haven’t heard back from Yahoo about their intent with Pipes so I’ll assume they’re just screwing around and having fun (which I guess is a somewhat valid statement about Yahoo as a whole – can Semel close the door after him when he leaves?). To see applications that actually show some business potential, read [...]
In: web services
9 Feb 2007Like many people, I find Yahoo Pipes to be a bold and exciting move. What I don’t quite get is what audience Yahoo is eventually planning to go after. I guess I don’t see how you make money out of this as a free service. This stuff is middleware, how do you slap ads around [...]
In: web services
15 Mar 2006Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet: "Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to [...]
In: web services
8 Dec 2005Enterprise software is so 2001 downturn, witness the Grand Central/Swivel story. These things work in funny, cyclical ways. Expect enterprise software to make a comeback sometime in 2007 when people realize than online advertising/publishing, personal/amateur boom or not, is not a $500B business. Please find me someone excited by podcasting who is not involved in [...]
In: web services
3 Nov 2005From the AWS blog: "The Amazon Historical Pricing web service gives developers direct, programmatic access to over three years of actual sales data for books, music, videos, and DVDs sold by third-party sellers on Amazon.com. Third-party sellers can use this data to make pricing decisions based on historical prices and market trends. Access to this [...]
In: web services
22 Aug 2005Not much time to get into the details of Yahoo’s Shopping Web Services as I’m catching up with plenty of material, but here are a few highlights taken from the FAQ: REST, no SOAP support no public commercial terms of service, you have to ask and negociate your own deal Relatively sophisticated rate limits I’ve [...]
I'm CEO of an online trade publishing firm in the marketing and defense verticals. We try to make news and data digestible and useful in an environment that is more noisy each day. This personal blog mixes my thoughts and interests on politics, business, software, and more, based on my business and personal experiences. Over the years I have posted items that turned out spectacularly wrong, and a few posts that stood the test of times better. Personal views only.