So what do I mean by this? Well here in Atlanta there seem to be a lot of events going on at the moment.  Depending on who you ask about the next up coming event, the response is different.  Ok, so that is reasonable. You ask the question, get an answer, and write it in your Pocket PC that you keep in your back pocket (also known as a small paper calendar).  Now comes the tricky part; if you already have that event written down then you don’t need to write it again, but if you don’t have that event, you write it down and claim that time and day.  So you are probably wondering what the heck this has to with SOA.  The reason this is like SOA is that when multiple providers like Microsoft Events.com, User Groups, members of the User Groups, and many other sources ask what is going on they may not get an answer right away.  In fact, they may never hear about the other event that is going on - ever!  So my thought is when Don Box and his Indigo team figures out how to have seamless communication through computer programs, he could share his findings with the community and we could have an easy way to find out what is going on in our town and any other town that we go to visit. 

So for all you smart people in the community - let me know what you think we can use to have some way for all of these user groups and community events to sync up in a nice calendar where we can all go for information.  Then I could write an app that calls a web service at Microsoft Events, which would go find out what is going on in town X and let me know - all from my one click desktop app! 

Ok so it isn’t really just like SOA, but you get the picture.  We need some way for everyone to talk together so we can know what is going on as far as events.

--Brendon Schwartz