Yahoo 360 and Lucasfilms' Habitat
Reading Yahoo! 360 through "The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat". A great little article with another great little article in a link. Well worth the read.
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In a certain sense, I agree. The RESTful architecture of del.icio.us should make it really easy to do some interesting things with smart proxies and other kinds of services. In essence, the real hope an promise of the RESTful web services model (over SOA-like models) is the potential ease of aggregating services and really doing web services "right" with little cost.
The danger with this approach is the dissolution of services into a morass of intermediated systems. In essence, if the really useful information and services are all managed by these intermediated services then the benefits of "mining" the information are lost. In essence, a big part of the benefit of what I'm calling "object-out interaction" is potentially lost if the object reference information isn't somehow centralized. By that I mean, the opportunity to discover like-minded people and communities from the objects out to the people. I'm writing a paper on this at the moment, so more on this in the future.
Now, the "somehow" up there was also deliberate. Another nice thing about RESTful systems is the ways in which notification and update can be managed. It should be possible to have these intermediating services notify the central system in various ways to maintain the advantages of centralization. It is not clear how easy that is to do at the moment.
Finally, I do see a significant problem in this whole approach. Because of the need to mix representation (read data models) with presentation (read user-interface) in these RESTful services, it can be really quite difficult to provide a completely different UI as a front-end via such intermediated web services. Ideally, the real strengths of del.icio.us, which are in its data models, would be more or less directly accessible in a way that would allow for wide experimentation in user interface and service aggregation, without comprising the integrity of the original service. Hmmm... Definitely more on this later.