Recombinant growth

Recombinant growth, an excellent, um, fiscally aligned, term for what us geeks would call network effects.

Simplicity again

Clyde Hatter's piece entitled 'what is simple' is interesting. It resonates with my own hard won conclusion that API's can be both powerful and highly destructive (see APIs considered harmfull.

I've come to believe that APIs are at their best encapsulating purely algorithmic behaviour - libraries of maths functions being a classic example. When they are used to encapsulate access to what are basically documents flying around the place (The web!) they fall down and create more problems than they solve. None of the big vendors will sign up to that view because APIs also create huge potential for lock-in and huge potential for tools so simplify the APIs.

The scandalous secret of a lof of Web Service "APIs" is that they hide complexity of mans own making. Complexity that is not in the problem being solved ab initio. Web services risk extending a solution to micro-complexity management (OO and APIs) into the macro-complexity area where such approachs are known not to work (otherwise known as EAI).

Temporal decoupling

Temporal decoupling is a great two word description of a loose coupling design pattern that I have often advocated, but never in two words:-)

Push is dead, long live push

The fall, re-branding and subsequent rise of push publishing (now known as Weblogs/RSS).

The power of screenshots

Yup. I fell for it. I visited http://www.boa.org/, saw the link for the screenshot and clicked it. Very funny.