As web services started some years ago I was a big believer and still I think this technology is one of the key solutions to a living web. But in reality the adoption of web services has been surprising slow. At Creative Weblogging you see several implementations of web services as we pull related content from other sites.

Also as we read yesterday even the probably smartest concept of web services integration on an enterprise level (Grand Central BPL) is having a lot of problems to get traction. Simply speaking a web service is just a database that is extremely easy to access from anywhere in the world - sound promising but hasn't been used to far. ZdNet delivers a good answer to it:

"Has Web services, the technology intended to simplify programming, gotten too complex?

A debate is raging over whether the number of specifications based on Extensible Markup Language (XML), defining everything from how to add security to where to send data, has mushroomed out of control. defenders of advanced Web services specifications say they are needed to ensure that new computing architectures are flexible enough to accommodate both sophisticated and smaller-scale applications. Detractors say that simpler application development methods are good enough."

Blogging is clearly helping to spread XML (as RSS feeds) into people's minds. Maybe this is another reason for hope that simpler XML standards will find more users...