Google responds to privacy concerns here.
My personal concern was about emails remaining on Google's server even after I deleted them.. now that has been addressed, I'm looking forward to Gmail. I'm not so concerned about emails being scanned by software for serving up ads- as it is every spam filter does that, so I dont see why that should be something to worry about.
There have been a lot of concerns voiced about gmail- it 'reads' your email and uses that to serve up ads, deleting an email doesn't ensure that it really gets deleted from google servers etc..
Here's one for A9- they remember your searches and these searches are linked to your Amazon or A9 cookie, so your search history will be carried along with you, even if you switch computers.
Unlike your browser history, there isn't any way (at least for now) to get rid of earlier searches.
The good news is that they have a generic search interface that doesn't remember this history.
Just when you thought the Google v/s Yahoo/MSN fight was getting hot with Google encroaching into free email services.. in comes Amazon!
Amazon just launched a beta search engine called A9. It isn't competing with Google (for now at least!)- in fact it uses Google internally for web searches. What is does is turn its 'Search Inside the Book (TM)' into a bona-fide search functionality. It also remembers previous searches and has neat adjustable columns too. More reasons to use A9 are here.
[Update: April 15 1:36 PM] John Battelle has posted a very good review of A9, and what it means for Amazon & Google.
Danny Ayers has a nice diagram that you should look at while reading my description of Web service specifications..
Bill de hÓra maintains a RSS feed on Web service specifications. Why do we need an RSS feed for specifications?
The specification-proliferation may have something to do with it.
Bill goes on to call it a 'cargo-cult' in another weblog entry.
Don Box puts it even more bluntly ('standards are like bodily orifices.'- though he later refutes it).
To this I say: yes, there are a lot of specifications out there! And you'll probably see a few more over the rest of the year. While some of them will fall by the wayside (as a lot of good-intentioned technologies do), and others are more of 'technical position papers' and/or posturing (from competing standards for simple things like SOAP attachments to more complex WS composition standards), I do not believe that this is a cargo cult. These standards are out there to solve real world problems- EAI for instance (and EAI *is* a very complex).