First of all, a quick thank you to Rui for opening the gates of Planet Tao for me and a quick hello to everyone there. I’m proud to be among a bunch of great bloggers. Spend the day playing around with TurboGears and Ajax and I guess I’m falling in love with these newer web frameworks. The small application I’m developing - which derives from the bigger project I’ve been hinting about for a while now - relies on some DOM manipulation, asynchronous requests and whatnot. It’s the first time I’m using TurboGears to build a web app and so far, it’s been very helpful, not getting in the way at all. I’ll be blogging more extensively about this framework at some point in the future - after I get the chance of getting to the bottom of it - but for now suffice to say that it implements the MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture fairly well and that contributes to a definite speed-up in development. This surely comes across as old news to the majority of people, but sadly this reasoning hardly applies to where I come from. On another note, I’ve been increasingly thinking about all the Web Service frenzy out there and wondering what cool ideas are just waiting to be had by people. What I mean is, we already know of a lot of interesting so-called “mashups” among different web services: take HousingMaps for instance, which glues Google Maps and Craigslist together in dazzling fashion. Now, the idea of moving applications “up the stack” is also not new, but it’s a fact that the major services in different key areas are exposing APIs and otherwise their data to the world at large: Amazon provides their data through REST, the same is true for IMDb, not to mention how the major players, Google and Yahoo! are exposing APIs for a lot of their great services - Flickr being a good example. So my point is: take all these web services out there and all possible combinations between them. While many such mashups have already been implemented to great effect, many more are still out there dying to be found and realized - given the technical know-how, but more importantly the business accuracy and sense of opportunity. In a talk on the Web 2.0 Conference back in 2004, Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, said that unlike Web 1.0, the next generation is about making the Web better for computers. I concur. The means for bringing web applications up a notch, by relying on interesting third-party data - mostly made by users - is out there, up for grabs. And the possibilities are far from being exhausted.