O'Reilly Radar came out with their Best And Worst Technology of the Decade, which is a pretty good read. Here's their list:

The Best!!!

• AJAX
• Twitter
• Ubiquitous WiFi
• Smart Phones
• The Do-IT-Yourself MAKER culture
• Mainstream Open SOurce

I mostly agree, buy seriously... Twitter??? You're putting Twitter up there? You're going to give it a greater importance than YouTube, Wikipedia, and Facebook? The author concedes that most tweets about what celebrities have for dinner are kind of silly... but:

"the real power of the 140 character dynamo is that it has brought about a resurgence of real web logging. The most useful tweets consist of a Tiny URL and a little bit of context."

I don't quite agree... Frankly, that problem was solved a lot better by Del.icio.us: post a link, describe it, tag it, and share it! They had a huge head start on this kind of movement... they just needed a bit more pizzaz to make it easier and more fun to use. Unfortunately, Del.icio.us was bought out by Yahoo, who can't run a Taco Truck let alone manage a global folksonomy.

Twitter is the killer app for Public Relations people... Just like LinkedIn was the killer app for recruiters. Twitter will be "hot" regardless of how useful it is, because it helps PR people do their jobs. PR people are very skilled at getting you to talk about what PR people want you to talk about... and PR people walk you to talk about Twitter.

Although... I can't say I mind. a couple of keywords in 140 characters is much easier to digest than the typical press release... and a lot more genuine.

The one other thing that Twitter does well is breaking news... Such as the Iran election last year. However, there is a huge signal-to-noise ratio problem. It is trivially simple to run a bunch of Zombie Tweeters to spam the twitscape with phony URLs after events break.

The Worst!!!

• SOAP
• Intellectual Property Wars
• The Cult of Scrum
• Ubiquitous Work

Hrm... an O'Reilly geek blasting SOAP... how unusual ;-)

I agree somewhat... the IP wars are crippling software innovation, simply because geeks are much faster than lawyers, and don't like any restrictions. Scrum can become problematic, but the same holds true for any rigid software methodology. Also, if you hate always being at work, then you had better ditch your smart phone ;-)

I do agree that some vendors oversell SOAP... and all are guilty of piling on yet-another-web-services-specification. However, it's important to remember that none of this is inherent to the goals of SOAP: it's just that one vendor had a wacky idea, implemented it, and then called it the "standard" way to do something.

SOAP worship has partly fueled the rise of JSON, but JSON is a backlash to obtuse XML formats in general. It's a much better way to describe human readable data, but it still has problems with multipart messages and binary files. In other words, you still need some kind of standard on top of JSON to describe complex messages between systems.

It doesn't matter whether you use ReST or SOAP... people will still feel a desire to come up with a "standard" way of describing messages between systems. For example, ReST kind of falls apart when you want to do batch processing over XMPP instead of HTTP... so it's only a matter of time before somebody comes up with a "standard" way to do it. Probably Google, since Google Wave relies heavily on XMPP.

The evil here is not in trying to adopt standards... it's in the inevitable tendency for people to believe the "standard" way is the "right" way. Software just doesn't work like that in the long term. Using a standard means that your software doesn't change... and stable software is the same thing as dead software.