There's some big announcements (in my opinion anyway) from Windows Live today. Read here:
David Treadwell on New and Updated Windows Live Platform Services
The highlights are:
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Messenger API that enables you to build your own Messenger client
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Contacts API moves to beta (no more screen-scraping required if you want to share your contacts)
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Silverlight Streaming moves to beta
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WLID Delegated Auth - You can now choose how long a third party can access your personal data for witout having to surrender your password
But the biggest news (IMO):
Microsoft is making a large investment in unifying our developer platform protocols for services on the open, standards-based Atom format (RFC 4287) and the Atom Publishing Protocol (RFC 5023). At MIX we are enabling several new Live services with AtomPub endpoints which enable any HTTP-aware application to easily consume Atom feeds of photos and for unstructured application storage (see below for more details). Or you can use any Atom-aware public tools or libraries, such as .NET WCF Syndication to read or write these cloud service-based feeds.
In addition, these same protocols and the same services are now ADO.NET Data Services (formerly known as “ Project Astoria”) compatible.
So, Microsoft are standardising on ADO.Net Data Services/Astoria which kind of answers some of the questions I posed when I wrote Astoria and Web3S converge. Standardisation is of obviously good and the side benefit is that the Astoria team already ship client libraries for AJAX & Silverlight (see Mike Taulty's blog for demo videos- http://mtaulty.com/CommunityServer/blogs/mike_taultys_blog/archive/2008/01/17/10130.aspx). I also have some Astoria related material here: http://blogs.conchango.com/jamiethomson/archive/tags/Astoria/default.aspx
One other thing:
Application Based Storage
Application Based storage is an experimental API which allows application developers to store a small amount of state/configuration data in the Windows Live data centers on behalf of a user. This API has an AtomPub service end point so developers will be able to call this using ADO.NET data services or other AtomPub compatible tools. The real value kicks in here if an application was to have hundreds of thousands of users as the storage is offloaded to Windows Live infrastructure.
That sounds to me like a first foray into competing with Amazon S3 & EC2. Watch this space.
-Jamie