Google Base vs. Microsoft's Astoria

Here's a great comparison from Dare Obasanjo. He ends with the following conclusion:

In comparing both approaches there is a lot to like and dislike. I like the "expand" feature in Astoria as well as the fact that I can retrieve XML results from multiple paths of the hierarchy. However there does seem to be a paucity of operators and functions for better filtering of results.

From the Google Base data API, I love the "crowd" feature and having a full library of functions for performing tests within predicates. Also some of the operators such as the ones for finding results near a certain location are quite impressive although unnecessary for the majority of RESTful protocols out there. That said, I do think they went overboard on some of the features such as having if...else blocks within the URIs. I suspect that some of that complexity wouldn't have been needed if they just had hierarchies instead of a flat namespace that requires complex filtering to get anything out of it.