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October 11, 2004
Pricing web services
Pricing web services: Phil Wainewright notes that Amazon anticipates commercially pricing its upcoming Alex Web Information Service (free during beta). I think this is important -- data services need to have some active "what's in it for me" component, some type of financial feedback, in order to remain stable. Something that is only "free to users" ends up being "expensive to creators"... one-way flows are vulnerable, as we've seen with how spammers infected email traffic, or even how telemarketers infected telephone traffic. The Watson Users mailing list and Dan Wood's blog have shown how expensive it is to rely on ad-hoc or informal services... a lot of the maintainence in this tool lies in handling changes to the formatting of the data they're scraping, because there's no compensation to the data creator in maintaining backwards-compatibility. David Longworth has more in his article "Web Services Without Warranties" on these early days of learning the total set of economics on providing remote data services.
Posted by John Dowdell at October 11, 2004 4:04 PM