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One of my early uses of Web services, back in 1999, predated SOAP and WSDL. It was a script to calculate what I called Web mindshare. It combined Yahoo’s capability of enumerating sites in a category with AltaVista’s capability of counting inbound links to each of those sites. It was a primitive version of what Google, then in beta, went on to prove dramatically: Links measure authority. What interested me even more, though, was how easily that little script was able to compose a novel service — ranking everything in a category — from two existing but unrelated services.
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