A open, flexible Facebook-style API for Apps would be awesome.  Imagine the community building the next generation office platform.

Right now, developers outside of Google can write Gadgets that live on the outside layout areas of GMail. Google developers have done some interesting things with Labs – I use the easy to find "Mark as Read" button / gadget.  However, if trusted development teams in the community, and developers at companies adopting Google Apps, had complete access to everything – including the interface, Apps would meet the challenge set forth to it by Microsoft Office (and its powerful friend, VBA).  A fully programmable cloud-based office suite.

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This looks really cool.  I hope it is not all for naught.  Anyone using it?  Have any examples? Please post them!

The support forum has few active topics. But I think there is potential here, even if Yahoo doesn’t exist in the same form 3 or 6 months from now.  I don’t think Microsoft would shut this stuff down.

YQL looks really neat and is a popular topic.  YQL seems like a highlight of this offering.

What is a Google OneBox?  The post here explains: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/07/google-onebox-results.html It is basically a shortcut search that returns a snippet of data, like weather or movietimes.  It is really cool when it works correctly.  However, I am stuck with Celsius for the weather OneBox – which makes this useless for me as I can’t do the Fahrenheit to Celsius conversion faster than just browsing to wunderground.com.

Microsoft  and eBay score unexpectedly high marks with developers, according to Evans.

You decide, the  report can be found here.   But I can’t quite grasp what sort of survey panel they used that didn’t have Amazon, with AWS – arguably the most robust and uniquely used Web 2.0 service framework yet, and Facebook – with the highest profile and most accelerating and deftly used developer program in the short history of Web 2.0 in its Facebook Apps program, blowing everyone away.

But then I read Evans Data’s client list, revealing both eBay and Microsoft as customers.

John Andrews, president of Evans Data, shills for Microsoft here:

“Microsoft has much more experience in developer programs and it shows”

Now this has traditionally been true, heck my company was a Microsoft shop for years because of the quality of their developer programs in a sea of almost non-existing offerings from the players of the day (Sun, Oracle, IBM, and the like).  But today?  I think that putting up MSN widgets against Facebook and Amazon just shows how little the offering is.  Google is an upstart and already commands high marks in this area, despite not being an Evans Data Advisory Panel member or client.

It would be pretty cool if someone wrote a Web 2.0 survey/rating system for Web 2.0 development programs.  I would trust the community at large more than a sample group programmed by a private analyst group that may very well be paid by the entities it is reviewing.

Please run Microsoft again.  It needs you.

I think you may need it too.   Your recent comments are not very helpful.

I was kind of hoping for something more profound and insightful than  “We can expect that the variety and quality of software will accelerate in the years ahead.”

You used to say cool stuff like “Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.”   Now you sound like an article from the in-flight magazine, from 1996.

Your brainchild’s most threatening competitor, Google, has a CEO too.  Eric Schmidt is definitely in tune with the future of the web. His recent interview in Wired was revealing and revealed the visionary aspect of being a CEO of a major force in web technology,

Steve Ballmer is awesome. His videos are great.  He eats hippie CEO’s like Jerry Yang for breakfast.  However, Microsoft needs someone at the helm for all the software stuff that you were good at for all those years.  No, it wasn’t perfect.  But it sure was popular and effective.  The question really is, what does Microsoft look like in 10 years?  Because the Internets aren’t waiting for it to catch up.

Best,

Ed