I hate

Web services that require me to open up more holes in my firewall to use. Is there a good solution for this? I hate having to open up more and more holds, it's just more and more places for security holes to creep in.

One thing that might be an interesting solution is some kind of switchboard service. Basicly it is a server that passes off messages between machines that are behind firewalls. It's similar to a proxy server, but has some intelligence there to hold onto messages and pass them on to a specific user that is connected to it.

The program using the service would then ping the server every minute (or longer if it doesn't have to be instantaneous) and see if there were any messages for it. Those messages could be something like an IM, and XML-RPC or SOAP call, or anything similar to that.

Of course the other big problem with this is coming up with something that everyone would buy into so that we don't end up having a bunch of different services all offering kind of the same thing.

What brought this up? There's at least one new thing for Radio I can't do without opening up some holes in my firewall at home and at work.