I’ve been reading the Google Data APIs blog for a few months and have been impressed at how Google has been quietly executing on the plan of having a single uniform RESTful Web service interface to their various services. Contrast this with the API efforts on Yahoo! Developer Network or Windows Live Dev which are an inconsistent glop of incompatible RESTful protocols, SOAP APIs and XML-RPC methods all under the same roof. In the Google case, an app that can read and write data to Blogger can also do so to Google Calendar or Picasa Web Albums with minimal changes. This is not the case when using APIs provided by 2 Yahoo! services (e.g. Flickr and del.icio.us) or 2 Windows Live services (e.g. Live Search and Windows Live Spaces) which use completely different protocols, object models and authentication mechanisms even though provided by the same vendor.

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