It just so happened that I re-listened to his talk a several weeks ago during a walk to the bank. Hearing it for the second time, I was much more receptive to his ideas about creating a simple and open replacement for all the proprietary communications protocols currently in use by database vendors. By using HTTP and RSS or Atom, one could get 80% of the needed functionality while also greatly simplifying how things work.
The benefit is that you'd have a single API that could be used to query, update, and index structured data on the web--anywhere on the web. It's a pretty powerful vision and something I didn't expect to see for a couple more years.
Give his talk a listen and tell me if you don't see Adam's fingerprints all over GData. It's time well spent if you care about this stuff.
About the Author:
Jeremy Zawodny is the author of the popular Jeremy Zawodny's blog. Jeremy is part of the Yahoo search team and frequently posts in the Yahoo! Search blog as well.
