I spent a couple hours this afternoon with Jeff Barr, evangalist for Amazon's Web services, and Tim O'Reilly and Rael Dornfest from O'Reilly. They came to talk to a bunch of folks from the MSDN and Microsoft.com teams about their experiences with public Web services (something we at MSDN care a lot about ;-).

The conversation was very interesting. One of the most interesting observations was that developers end up using public Web services in ways their creators can't predict or imagine, adding credence to the notion that intended usage should not be a limitation.

Another key point was scope and simplicity. This is, of course, a sticking point for a lot of people. Some people think REST and Perl are the easiest path, while others prefer proxies generated from WSDL. (Personally, I prefer C# and raw XML). It would be very interesting to expose both, as Amazon does, and let developers decide...