Second Thoughts

Alex Iskold at Read/Write Web has a review of companies that use web-services as part of their platform/backbone.They list six building blocks of the Web Computing Platform and give an extensive review of companies who offer the components to 3rd parties, like f.x. Amazon S3, and the customer fronting services that use them, like f.x. SmugMug - a photo sharing site.

Using the web-platform is at the core of the Second Brain strategy. We are already using Amazon S3 for file-storage, and we are looking for other applications and services that we could integrate to expand our offering and functionality. What we really like about the Web platform is partly the ease of integration, but most of all, that we don’t have to invent and build everything ourselves.

We also believe, that in the end, this will be a benefit for the users. Let say for instance that we want to offer photo sharing capabilities, or blogging. Instead of creating a brand new service, why not just use the APIs of Flickr and Typepad, and have people retrieve and publish from these already familiar services. Flock is doing this to leverage their browser, and I think this is the right way to go as far as competitiveness goes as well. We only want to compete on our core capabilities, for anything else, there is web-services and open APIs.