Fine-grained tail of the Mechanical Turk

Nov 7th: I'm constantly being told web services need to be coarse-grained if they're to be successful. And then along comes something like Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which seems to be interesting (and potentially very successful) precisely because it calls on very finely grained units of work ...

Microsoft and the roadkill ahead

Nov 2nd: Lurking within Microsoft's Live announcements yesterday were some intriguing mentions of APIs. Ignore for a moment all the excitement about Microsoft's plunge into ad-funded online services to challenge Google and focus instead on the implications of this paragraph from its press release:

"Continuing the company’s fundamental commitment to delivering a platform the industry can use to create solutions, Microsoft is making its new live services available to developers to customize, extend and remix ...