The Cloud goes Postal

The functionality of the US Post Office is now available on a Cloud-based delivery model, courtesy of NetSuite. Check out the story by Maureen O'Gara at sys-con.

The USPS services seem to be deployed as a SaaS model, accessed through a browser. As yet there do not seem to be managed PaaS APIs available (or are there?) which can be pulled into other applications, for example iPhone apps. Of course, right now it's easy to co-opt the Web interface to USPS.com in order to programmatically query Post Office shipping times over HTTP. Although, I can just imagine REST zealots arguing that it should really be termed the "GET Office" in that case [really lame joke, I know :-) ].