Web Services: Why aren't we seeing more?

So, I was reading G. Andrew Duthie's grammer nazi spiel,  and I decided to surf on over to dictionary.com. While I was “just visiting,” I was struck by the realization that a dictionary or thesaurus lookup is almost the textbook example for providing a web service, yet I didn't see any reference to such on the dictionary.com website. Is anyone really using web services outside internal projects or verticle integration efforts?

5 Comments

  • Dictionary.com can provide advertising on their Website... they can't garentee provision of advertising through a WebService provided to you.



    Now if you were prepared to pay for use of the service that might be a different matter.



    Actually there's serveral dictionaries available online both to download and for querying. Try a couple of searches on Google.

  • You've got to wonder what the benefit of web services are for most public providers. A lot of websites generate advertising revenue, but if they provide their key functionality through some backend process where the end user can strip any advertising, it looses all of its value.



    On top of this lack of value there is an additional cost of increased traffic to the web services.

  • Web Services have great value - just not as a revenue source. Amazon and Google are two solid examples. I foresee where other service-based businesses (forgive the pun) will come to use them too. Airline registration, freight movers....



    Another area of likely growth is distribution of software updates.



    In our company we primarily use web services (SOAP actually) to avoid firewall issues. We're considering things like providing our part catalog to various resellers ala Amazon.



    It's when you look into subscriptions, or providing revenue that the web services business model breaks down. Could you imagine how stunted the use of RSS would have een if you had to pay to subscribe to someone's weblog? Alot - no, check that... all - businesses that approach web services from a revenue generating strategy are probably doomed to fail, just as badly as those who tried to make the internet a new vehicle for profits back in the mid and late 90s.

  • Dave, you make a rather strong claim: "all - businesses that approach web services from a revenue generating strategy are probably doomed to fail." I think Web services offer another "medium" (terrible word choice, I know) to consume a service, where as the World Wide Web is another "medium." And there are businesses that make money by having people pay a usage or annual fee to utilize their Web site.



    Perhaps a business that says, "We're just going to do Web services and get rich" is doomed to fail, but one that says, "We offer this great service for profit via the WWW, let's add Web service support," will do well, IMHO, as with those who say, "Here is a new business plan to offer X via the WWW for $$$, let's also use Web services."

  • I was writing a module for Dot Net Nuke for fun and looked into web services. I was able to write it for some free Web Services but they all had one thing in common, they were extremely slow. I found some Web Services that were extremely fast but required a subscription ID as one of the inputs. In the case of this weather module, I could see where money could be made running this Web Service.



    I don't think it is fair to say all companies trying to make money from Web Services are doomed to fail. In fact, I can't imagine putting up a free one. Why would I want to pay more for the extra bandwidth needed?

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