I’m beginning to wonder if everything is turning into a stream of messages.
Item: I’m living in the middle of the world of syndication, and a feed is just a little bundle of messages.
Item: Amazon apparently wants to offer message management services to the whole world.
Item: The last big project I worked on before joining Sun was all about message-queuing infrastructure.
Item: The Web-Services people are striving mightily to deal with events, although WS-Eventing manages to ignore both the store-and-forward and post-and-poll message frameworks.
Item: Podcasting.
Item: Dave Sifry just pinged me to tell me about Technorati Favelets, so you can have an instant look across a millions-wide message stream.
What does all this mean? Down in the trenches, it means we have to worry a whole lot about infrastructure. Because combining proven buffering and caching techniques with the everything-is-a-message view has the potential to drive Net traffic way, way up from its already-insane level.
And there’s scope for a lot of fun, because the right programming primitives and data stores for a world in which everything is a message and every message is asynchronous, well, we don’t know what those are yet. Time to get to work on it.
