At the Office 2.0 conference, the need for more standards around data exchange and single sign on between applications was a common topic. I believe there is a need to discuss account provisioning as well.
The typical viewpoint of the Web 2.0 and Office 2.0 models is that two companies will each build an interesting open service, and someone else will glue them together in an interesting way.
Ignoring many other issues, one way for this to really matter is if someone could build a new open service powered in some part by the other two (or three, etc). Not just a one-off application.
To do this, the new service will need to provision new accounts for the streams of data to pass through and back into the top level service.
And depending on the top level service, their users may never know the other service was used, or may not care to ever log in. So it isn't necessarily dependent on single sign on.
For example, my application provisions a new Wufoo form that was predefined in some manner and handed off during provisioning. Next a DabbleDB or Caspio account is created and Wufoo is configured to push submitted data to it. Last my application pulls in a few charts from Caspio/Dabble and embeds them in my dashboard.
Preferably my users never log into Wufoo, and hopefuly there is a way to pull charts from Caspio progmatically as well.
Obviously common data exchange formats would be helpful, any data exchange format is good. But if I had to ask users to create two additional accounts to use my service manually, people would be less likely to use it.
Again there are a lot of untouched issues here in the scenario.
The point is that Office/Web 2.0 needs to be a "write-through web", not just a "writable web".
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