People work with WS-* web services in PHP? Why?

I'd love to give ws02 a fair shake because they have an open source business model. They have a web services framework for PHP which seems interesting from an academic standpoint. But I think WS-* web services are WAY too complicated when compared to REST.

Just look at this new product description from ws02:

The WSO2 IS enables LAMP and Java websites to provide strong authentication based on the new interoperable Microsoft CardSpace technology, which is built on the open standards Security Assertion Mark-up Language (SAML) and WS-Trust.

Your life is now 1 minute shorter after trying to read and fully understand that paragraph. Nevermind how much time would be spent trying to actually get this stuff to work.

I spent a lot of time in 2001-2002 working with Amazon's merchant program and the SOAP feeds required for putting client product on the Amazon site. I generally think that Amazon has a pretty good clue about how to do things technically and they seemed to make it as easy as possible while using SOAP. But it was still way too complicated for what we were trying to achieve (ie, send a list of available product to Amazon to sell ). And at the time, it was a nightmare in PHP. Now of course, we have the official PHP SOAP extension and some items in PEAR to work with too (does nusoap still exist?)

But I've run screaming from WS-anything since then, only getting caught in its claws a few times. It hasn't gotten any easier. It's gotten more difficult. And more pointless. I'm not alone in this thinking.

So I guess the ws02 folks are trying to solve the issue of authentication for web services. Hasn't web services authentication been solved already in a much easier way too?

Gmail 2.0 crashing Firefox with extreme prejudice

It's mostly when clicking different folders like "spam." I wasn't sure what was going as this just started happening the past 3 days when I noticed that sure enough, I've been moved over to Gmail 2.0. I tried disabling and then finally uninstalling all my add-ons (plugins) to Firefox to no avail. Selecting "older version" in the top right nav of the gmail page made the problem go away. If you're listening google, please fix this.

UPDATE:  you may need to select "older version" every day or at least a couple of days a week since gmail doesn't seem to remember that setting.  And even the latest Firefox 2.0.0.11 with no extensions has this problem.

Open source twitter clone anyone?

Does anyone know of an open source twitter clone?  Preferably in PHP or Python.  Not a client mind you, but the server guts of receiving IMs and doing something with them, enabling followers, public viewing, etc.  I want to implement this on an intranet inside a corp network and obviously not display our tweets for public consumption, but only internal consumption.  If this doesn't exist, what do you all think is the easiest way to create this?  An instance of jabber or something else?

Is Microsoft buying Facebook a good thing for PHP?

Microsoft is buying a piece of Facebook. What do we all think this means for PHP since Facebook is one of the "web 2.0" leaders built on PHP? The way I see it, here are the options:

1. Facebook continues on its merry path, taking only funding from Microsoft
2. Facebook continues on its merry path, taking funding from Microsoft in addition to some development "resources." Resources here could be people, equipment, and technology. The free people, equipment, and technology probably won't fit very well in a LAMP environment. Pressure to move infrastructure to MS-friendly environment mounts.
3. Microsoft rewrites the whole thing in C#
4. Microsoft learns how simple and scalable PHP is and freaks out, unleashing a FUD campaign the likes of which we've never even dreamed of.
5. Microsoft learns from the open source environment, partially embraces it, and creates PHP.net, a half functioning version of PHP for .net framework.
6. Microsoft learns from the open source environment, fully embraces it, and abandons Windows by creating their own GUI for the next version of Linux.

In reality, I can really only see #1 or #2 happening. Your thoughts?