Google, Dave, and Ozzie

I MAY BE SHOWING my age, but say Kukla, Fran, and Ollie and most people will recall a prototypical puppet show from the ’50s. I can’t remember a thing about the show or the characters, but somehow I know it was important.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if the same thing happens a generation from now, with Google, Dave, and Ozzie. “Which one was Google? Dave who? Was Ozzie the funny one or the straight man?” someone will ask. But they will know that everything they touch or are touched by will somehow have been influenced by this trio.

Type “Kukla, Fran, and Ollie” in the home page of the Google search engine and you’ll find results 1-10 of about 2,210. I chose the Chicago Historical Society link ( www.chicagohs.org/KFO/kfo.html ) and discovered that the show debuted one year to the day before I was born.

Two other things jumped out of the text: The show was performed live and unscripted. “As [co-creator Burr] Tillstrom once said, ‘You don’t need a script when you’re talking to friends.’ ” And another quote resonated across the generations: “As Kukla, Fran, and Ollie’s popularity grew in the early 1950s, it retained its fundamental simplicity.”

Dave is Dave Winer, co-creator of Simple Object Access Protocol, or SOAP. Ozzie is Ray Ozzie, the creator of Notes and now Groove. And Google, Dave, and Ozzie are a modern-day Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance (which Google defines as the most memorable double-play combination in the history of baseball), using SOAP to link together the basics of an Internet Operating System.

This is loosely coupled teamwork, to be sure. Ozzie’s Groove Networks uses Winer’s Manila Weblog server internally. “We have an in-house Weblog that we use to keep everybody in the company apprised of what’s going on, on a daily basis, we point at this, point at that,” Ray says. “The person who writes it has a neat personality, people like to read it.”

Type “Dave Winer and Ray Ozzie” into Google and you’ll travel to Winer’s Scripting News Weblog ( www.scripting.com ). “I finally had a chance to use Radio today,” Ozzie writes Winer about his new Weblog authoring tool. “Simplicity is very difficult, and from my perspective you seem to have hit the mark.”

As SOAP spreads beyond its roots to form the bottom layer of an expanding Web services stack, Winer has fought hard to retain its fundamental simplicity. And the interoperability work with the SOAPBuilder’s List paid off once more when Google published a SOAP API using the Apache Java implementation developed as part of the interoperability project.

Suddenly you could query and return results from 2 billion Web documents to your own or any application that supports SOAP. Weblogs sprouted with Google boxes as the popular search engine was reborn as a Web service. I already use Google as a spelling checker and memory-jogger; now I can embed it directly in Word, or poll Google (and the Web) automatically for new information in context as I write.

SOAP is rocking Ray Ozzie’s world too. He saw the power in collaborative Weblogging too. “I had all these plans nine months ago,” Ray recalls. “We were going to pop some SOAP interfaces on the back of [Groove’s] Outliner tool and we were going to do this OPML stuff.”

Type “OPML” (Outline Processor Markup Language) into Google and you’ll find it’s “an XML-based format that allows exchange of outline-structured information between applications” written by — you googled it — Dave Winer. Ray continues: “And the whole thing blossomed into this big edge services thing, and it’s way, way bigger than anything we imagined, and it’s really reshaping the future of Groove.”

Edge services are Web services exposed at the edge of the network, on the client PC. In Groove, says Ozzie, they’re SOAP interfaces, a vast array of WSDL (Web Services Description Language) schemas, and a new SOAP relay server. “It represents a stable point on the Internet that a calling application calls into, and that server routes the request out to where the client happens to be connected to the network.”

That sounds a lot like one of the missing pieces Groove’s enterprise peer services could bring to Microsoft’s repositioned Hailstorm (.Net My Services) technologies. “The fact that My Services’ focus is toward enterprise and toward enterprise servers means it’s probably more relevant than it was when it was being talked about as a consumer Web service.”

Ozzie says it’s not for him to discuss the next generation of Office. “But the Hailstorm APIs were an effort to create a contemporary Web services interface on top of a set of generally useful services.” He lists some of them — a directory, messaging, calendar. “So I would just simply say — what is the evolution of their server products with respect to those contemporary Web services APIs? And then all of a sudden a whole new world opens up in terms of — wow, OK. …”

Ozzie can’t say much more publicly, but Hailstorm’s obituaries in both Weblogs and the mainstream press sound premature. Nor is the Groove’s rich UI headed for the scrap heap in favor of the ubiquitous browser. “I don’t think the browser is the right paradigm for interacting with other people.”

SOAP may be the broker between Groove’s secure invitation-only shared spaces and the volatile real-time world of Google and Radio. Groove 2.0’s Form tool is a harbinger of this, Ozzie suggests. “In-house we’ve got a Headlines tool that lets you create a dashboard of sorts into which flows new things that are happening from a variety of shared spaces in summary form into a page-oriented fashion.

“You’ll see the inverse through some of the edge services, serving what’s going on in Groove out to browser interfaces so that you have universal accessibility if you happen to be on the road — or to integrate it as part of a larger application.” So you won’t need a script when you’re talking to friends.