I have been posting on the current wave of content aggregators – Google Notebook, OneNote and Zoho Notebooks. I have been reading content from differnt sites and it seems people are taking sides of local applications such as OneNote versus Web-based applications such as Google and Zoho.
Personally I like seeing competition in the marketplace, it helps keep applications fresh and companies continue to make progress to create the latest and greatest.
I was reading a post by Allison Randal – Beyond the Browser. In this post she states the following:
The wave of the future is not web browser applications. Instead we’re coming full circle back to desktop applications, but this time we’ve broken the old idea of single user silo applications with no connection to the outside world. The wave of the future is lightweight desktop applications with the same massively networked, Web 2.0 behavior we’ve come to expect from browser applications.
I have to say that I agree with this line of thinking. Web-based applications are great as long as you have access to the web. I currently live in Portland, Oregon and we don’t have access to the Internet everywhere. How am I supposed to access my web-based applications when I am offline?
Local applications work very well, but collaboration is a bit harder, which creates silos of content.
Allison focus is on LINA (btw the way, cute bunny) and the Linux space, but this is still pertinent for the other OS’s, there needs to be a merging of the following technologies.
- Web-based behavior that allows easy collaboration.
- Local application component that allows access to content while working offline.
This merging of technologies needs to be done in a way that is easy for users to adopt. Users shouldn’t need to know or understand difficult configurations to get this to work. It should be an uncomplicated setup that allows for seamless integration. The user should be unaware if they are getting content locally or from the web.
I look forward to what the future will hold.
Thanks to Scoble’s Link blog for the link to this post.
May 29, 2007 at 9:55 am
[...] May 29, 2007 at 10:55 pm · Filed under Dekoh, Rich Internet Application, User Experience, Desktop Rich Internet Applications bring a new dimension of richness to web applications. While there are some who are skeptical about RIA value for end users there are others who beleive that it is the Future Direction of Applications. [...]
May 29, 2007 at 4:22 pm
This is an interesting debate… any successful solution will need to be a hybrid of web and installed software.
I would be curious to read if this discussion applies to the players, utilities, and tools that have a huge, and often unseen, impact on our technology experience. Any thoughts?
May 29, 2007 at 7:50 pm
[...] Applications with Web-Based Collaboration In my post Future Direction of Applications, I discussed some of the issues plagued by our current set of [...]
August 19, 2008 at 1:12 am
[...] Rich Internet Applications bring a new dimension of richness to web applications. While there are some who are skeptical about RIA value for end users there are others who believe that it is the Future Direction of Applications. [...]