I'll be flying out for the Microsoft SPARK workshop in Las Vegas tonight. I've been trying to wrap my mind around what I want to talk about. Last year I was really jazzed about the concept of The Web as a Platform including Web APIs and conversations around SOAP vs. REST. Since then a couple of things have changed in the B0rg cube, the Indigo folks (i.e. Windows Communications Foundation) now consider supporting REST to be important and a lot of the stuff I suggested in my ThinkWeek paper is going to be implemented by a new group formed to support the Windows Live platform. All this will be discussed and new stuff revealed next week at the MIX '06 conference which I won't be attending.

I've recently begun to get jazzed about storage platforms for Internet-scale services. I can't help but smile when I read posts like Patrick Logan's Storage Paradigms where he writes

Stephen Williams writes in the FoRK email list on an exchange about Amazon's new storage service...

I firmly believe that both full filesystem semantics and ACID integrity constraints are red herrings and have seen a number projects reach the same conclusion...

With database-based applications, even when you have ACID capabilities, there are a number of reasons to avoid updates, avoid "accumulators", and otherwise avoid many of the situations where you needed transactions to begin with.

...
I will be interested to learn if Amazon has now or will offer some higher-level services on their storage service. Search, matching, versioning, etc. I see they want to keep it simple, and I agree with that. Before long though people will want to do things with their storage. Some of those things will be better done very close to the data itself.

I wonder if/when we'll see the ability to put computations very near Amazon's storage (including indexes, calculations, searches, etc.) that are aware of the format of the stored data, that is secure, etc. Storage is just the most basic start of a shared grid of services.

I suspect I'll end up writing another ThinkWeek paper this year. More than likely the content will draw heavily from the ideas referenced in my previous blog post entitled SQL Databases and Internet-Scale Applications.