This is not to say that they are bad, but I find that all too frequently the resulting API’s are poorly designed due to forgetting one thing, RPC (Remote Procedure Call) is expensive. Now by RPC, I do not mean custom messaging formats such as SOAP, or XML-RPC, I mean calling a method on a remote server. Do not think that just because you are using HTTP as the message format with something like XML or JSON, that calling GET /resource, is significantly all that different from calling get_resource in a SOAP call.

I think that Google’s (not Blogger’s) OpenID is a failure. It’s not memorable and you can’t find it. I’ve been trying to figure out where google has my OpenID listed for 30 minutes now. This is not the first time I’ve had to do this. I usually use Blogger’s because it uses my blog’s url, but it’s currently error-ing with a typepad blog. Why can’t google use something like google.com/username ?