Too Many Gateways
Sunday, May 28th 2006 | Ismael Ghalimi
When I heard about SocialMail — an RSS-to-SMTP gateway — the first thing that came to my mind was: “cool, a new application to play with”. Then, I started thinking about the consequences of having to install yet another gateway to bridge one protocol with another (RSS and SMTP), and translate one data format into another (blog post to email). After a while, I realized that yet another thing was broken with Office 2.0 and needed to be fixed.
Today, I use no less than 9 gateway services:
- Application to RSS: Spanning Salesforce
- Blog to RSS: Feed Burner
- Fax to Mail: eFax
- Mail to RSS: SocialMail
- RSS to Mail: FeedBlitz
- Mail to SMS: TeleFlip
- RSS to iCal: Spanning Salesforce
- RSS to RSS: Feed Digest
- Voicemail to Mail: SpinVox
What this means is that 9 accounts have to be created and managed, and there is no single place where I can see what happens to the collection of feeds I subscribe to. Also, once multiple services are cascaded onto each other, things can become quite complex and unreliable very quickly, as was discussed in this previous article. And forget about managing user access permissions if you want to syndicate and process events for a team, for none of these services provide any kind of group management features. Obviously, we need something better.
In reality, the problem is simpler than it looks: we’ve got multiple protocols on one end (HTTP, RSS, SMTP), the same protocols on the other, and a couple of data types to deal with (text and voice). All we need is some kind of EAI broker for Office 2.0 applications. Such a system would be made of some kind of hosted event broker, a collection of connectors for various protocols and data feeding mechanisms (push and pull), a set of data format translation tools, and a way to specify simple processing and routing rules. A more advanced version could also include a way to describe complex event routing and processing flows, similar to what BPM-influenced EAI brokers have done for the past few years.
At some point, I had hoped that Adam Rifkin’s Renkoo would be something like this, but I turned out to be wrong, which means that the opportunity for developing the first Office 2.0 Integration Broken is still open. If anyone ends up building such a thing, I will certainly become one of its first users. And if you need a platform for building it, keep Intalio in mind, for it should provide most of the building blocks out of the box.
In the meantime, I have added yet another entry into the Office 2.0 Bug Tracker.
Author’s note: Many thanks to Charlie Wood for having added RSS to iCal entry.
Entry filed under: Office 2.0
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Don’t forget, you also use an RSS-to-iCal gateway. This is how Spanning Salesforce’s iCal support is implemented.
I have the same problem: one application piggybacking on another one, be it online, on a server, or on the desktop.
Ismael:
I don’t think this “too many gateways” problem is ever going to be solved. It’s not just the issue of technical translation and standards to consider, it’s also the issue of making inevitable version-control and upgrade issues manageable across applications by people like me and my wife who hate having to “work under the hood.”
The evidence that things have already gone too far is the numerous web pages that are festooned with badges, browser download buttons, and a bewildering variety of feed management options. What that situation suggests to me is that, in the real world of the World Wild Web, things are getting harder to manage, not easier.
This is “playing into the hands of” large services (Yahoo, Google, large system integrators) who have it in their power to enforce some consistency and ease of use standards. That’s good for some users, not so good for others.
And I thought the world was getting flatter and simpler!
- Dennis
PS: I address some of these issues here.
Dennis,
I must agree with you. The service aggregators have it easier. Much easier.
[…] With the ability for customers and prospects to connect and build networks and communities, are Corporate Marketing Departments, even relevent? If possible, what can corporate marketing departents do to stay relevent? We explore this issue from multiple sides and issues –dial in to hear. Too many gateways mean we all end up with far too much information to keep up with. When a beta tester and geek like Ismael Ghalimi ends up getting frustrated, then you know it’s time for Identity 2.0. Rather than having to keep up with 30+ passwords/logins and having to worry about APIs and the technical specifics of multiple platforms, Identity 2.0 would streamline all of this into one gateway that shared your data with the applications you allowed. […]
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