Google's GData
I have been looking into Google's GData protocol lately, mainly out of frustration which is rooted to the peculiarities and conflicts between the various RSS versions and revisions ( needed for a tiny project we are working on ).
Google is driven forward by some extremely smart folks. Some of those folks decided to adopt open standards and protocols ( HTTP, ATOM, etc ) for providing the sort of functionality that allows developers to request(GET) and update/insert (PUT) objects and properties of those objects. Because both requests and responses are encapsulated in ATOM entries, and because the parsing and assembling ATOM feeds is straight forward, simple and standardized, it makes it extremely easy for Google and outside developers alike to fully utilize this architecture.
Hopefully, we 'll begin exporting at least some of the functionality of Pathfinder Services sooner or later - it will be more than interesting to see what our users can come up with.
