Rebooting the Web

For the last few years, the thing all the cool software developers have been talking about is Web Services. Unfortunately, what they’re usually talking about is SOAP and the rest of the W3C web services stack. My experience with SOAP suggests to me that it is not particularly well designed, an opinion others seem to share. But the real issue I have with it is calling the whole business “web services”. I’m all for an open protocol for remote method invocation based on HTTP and XML, but don’t assume that just because you’re using HTTP that means that what you’re doing is “web-like”.

What has made the web so successful is two things: openness and architecture. Openness is really important if you want your technology to gain widespread acceptance, but hyperlinking is what makes the web special. It’s, you know, the “web” part. Hyperlinking is what lets the users of the system generate not only all the content, but the distributed structure as well. And then it lets you do all sorts of other cool things, like have two guys from Stanford write an algorithm to analyze all that user-generated structure and build a great new search engine. When the history of the web is written, I predict that SOAP will be a footnote but that REST will play a key role. SOAP (or some improved version thereof) will have proven to be a useful technology. But if true web services are to be successful at all, REST, with its approach to exposing all of the objects of a system so that third parties can exploit that access in flexible and unpredictable ways, is how it will happen.

Another thing that people seem to overlook is that “web applications” are rarely very web-like. They’re deployed via the web, but not they’re not really part of the web at all. I love the travel site SideStep. It lets me build and manipulate a view of a huge number of airline fares in a way that lets me find exactly what I need. But I can’t link to an individual view of available fares that meet certain criteria and then send that link to a friend.

Wikipedia, on the other hand, lets you link to any topic, any version of a topic, any conversation about that topic, and the list of all edits by any user who has edited that topic. That kind of access to all the information in Wikipedia is what lets clever people create things like the WikiScanner that’s caused such a stir lately. Google Maps is another great example of a web-like web application. Its “Link to this page” offers a link to the current view that you can paste into an email or embed in your own web page. Which is not even to mention its support for an endless variety of mashups that display everything from US Census Bureau statistics to stores where Nintendo Wiis are in stock. Any time you give users a way to exploit your technology and remove the limits on how they can use it, good and surprising things will happen.

Which brings me to my point. I was highly amused to hear that Microsoft had rebooted the web a few months ago. Now if anybody knows something about rebooting, it’s Microsoft, but this was still pretty big news. If you haven’t heard about Silverlight, the new technology that spurred this surprising announcement, perhaps it’s because the rest of the web has continued doing its thing. You’d be forgiven for not noticing the reboot.

Silverlight looks like a really cool technology. But it didn’t, nor will it ever, reboot the web, because it isn’t the web. It lets you deploy applications via the web and it probably “plays well” with the web. But unless Microsoft builds in all sorts of clever ways for people to assemble and exploit this technology in unplanned ways, it will never be a part of the web. And for a company known for trying to strictly control how people use its software, that seems unlikely.

Update (July 4, 2008): Apparently Google agrees about REST. The true mark of REST’s success is that it’s starting to become the default. HTTP APIs are just made that way, without anyone necessarily even calling them “REST”.

Update (November 3, 2008): ProgrammableWeb adds its 1000th entry into its web API directory.  Guess which type of API accounts for 63% of the entries?

Favorite Web Apps

I got involved in a conversation the other day about favorite web apps. Here’s my Top Five:

• IMDB - Wikipedia is starting to contend with IMDB as the first place I go to look up information on movies, but IMDB holds a special place in my heart. I’ll never forget discovering it about ten years ago. That was the first time I was certain that the web was going to totally change how we organize and access information. The complete freedom to follow the highly interconnected relationships between movies, actors, and directors was thrilling. Before then, the web was a faster and more convenient way to get at information that could be had via other channels. Tremendously useful, for sure, but not quite revolutionary. There may be examples that pre-date it, but IMDB was the site that really brought it home for me.
• Wikipedia - Opinions seem to range from WIkipedia being more accurate than Encyclopedia Brittanica to it being so inaccurate as to be a joke. But for my money, it is the best thing created since the web itself. Paul Graham put it better than I could: “Experts have given Wikipedia middling reviews, but they miss the critical point: it’s good enough. And it’s free, which means people actually read it. On the web, articles you have to pay for might as well not exist. Even if you were willing to pay to read them yourself, you can’t link to them. They’re not part of the conversation.”
• Gmail - Not so much because of its AJAX implementation, although that’s very cool, but because of how Google re-thought the user interface of a mail reader. For example, moving entire threads back into the Inbox when someone replies to an archived message. And, of course, the ability to rapidly search all messages with a single keystroke is invaluable. Not only is it highly effective in discovering what I’m looking for, but it has freed me from my compulsion to create large hierarchies of mail folders. Filing messages in these folders consumes a lot of time and energy and often makes finding messages more difficult rather than easier.
• Google Maps - I love maps, and I’m not aware of a better site for easily navigating maps and satellite imagery. Google Earth/Maps* is one of my favorite ways to waste time.
• RSS - Sort of an application framework as opposed to a specific application, of course, but transformative however you categorize it. As Netvibes puts it, RSS lets you “remix” the web.

The key to most of these examples (and the web itself) is having a simple but effective model (e.g. information feeds, encyclopedia topics, email messages), defining an accessible set of operators on that model (e.g. publication/subscription/aggregation, create/edit/diff/rollback, labeling/archiving), and then removing as many restrictions from users’ ability to exploit the operators as possible.

* Update (2007-09-13): Make that Google Earth/Maps/Sky/Moon! **

** Update (2007-09-19): I missed Google Mars. I think Google’s producing map applications faster than I can keep track of them.

Realistic Space Combat Game?

Here’s a random thought I had today. Why has there not been a single space combat game with realistic physics since Asteroids? A game where you pilot a space fighter that doesn’t behave as if it’s in an atmosphere?

Well, I don’t think there’s anything that doesn’t exist somewhere on the internet (consider Rule 34). It turns out that someone asked themselves the same question and then actually created such a game, Void War. An independent game that received pretty weak reviews even from the backwater game sites I’ve never heard of that reviewed it, though. The game may not be much, but the designer’s story behind the creation of the game is pretty interesting.

I think there could be a market for a mainstream game of this nature. It would be difficult to learn to control a space fighter with realistic physics, so maybe the lack of arcadiness would doom such a game to failure. But I think positioning it as more of a simulation would help. Consider all the hyper realistic flight simulators out there. They couldn’t be less arcadey, but they have a small but loyal market. Better yet, why not a “Battlestar Galactica” game? One of that show’s hallmarks is the (mostly) realistic physics of its space combat. Duplicate that in a video game, offer the option for true realism or physics-lite combat and I think you’d have a solid hit.