Despite the BigCo’s attempts to hijack the definition of Web Services (note the capitalization), the fact is a web service (lowercase) is what we’ve been doing all along, whenever a response is generated from other than a static page. My RSS feeds are web services, even though they are once-an-hour updated XML pages available via http.
“What is a Web Service?. The definition of what constitutes a Web Service has been a moving target for quite some time. This article on Loosely Coupled notes that Gartner have modified their definition once more. The article reads on to state that SOAP and/or BPEL are not required to build Web Services.” from the CapeBlog