ReadWriteWeb

Atlantic Records, a subsidiary of Warner Music Group, has just launched an Adobe AIR app called Fanbase. This desktop app offers fans a way to connect with their favorite artists from Atlantic Records, a label whose roster includes big names like Death Cab for Cutie, James Blunt, Buckcherry, Gnarls Barkley, Jet, Panic At The Disco, Paramore, Rush, Staind, Rob Thomas, Simple Plan, Missy Elliot, and many more.

One of the software programs mentioned at this year's IORG conference (see our coverage here) was SmartDesktop. This program uses machine intelligence to automatically organize your information by project so you can quickly find what you need. In addition to organizing your emails and files created by desktop software, the beta version of this program also works with Google Docs and Zoho. These items appear in Smart Desktop as a "web resources," which allow you to quickly retrieve online documents without having to hunt through your browser bookmarks to find them.

Just last week, we wrote about rumors that Google would be bringing offline access to Gmail and Google Calendar using Gears very soon. Today, Yahoo announced that it will be giving offline access to all free and paid Yahoo Mail users through the Yahoo Zimbra Desktop. This is the first time that all Yahoo users get offline access to their accounts. Zimbra Desktop is available on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

By now, you've heard of Adobe AIR - the cross-OS runtime that lets you run rich internet applications on your desktop. We've covered several of our favorite apps in the past, as well as places to find new ones, but so far all we've seen are consumer applications. What about the business world? Will companies ever be using AIR apps on their desktops? As it turns out, many already do and they're as easy to deploy as Adobe Reader.

Here are some of the highlights from the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. The big news was Google App Engine - we provided extensive coverage and analysis. Also this week we looked into further use cases for Twitter, we analyzed the pros and cons of offline access to web apps, as well as why we need web apps on the desktop. We gave you seven tips to make the best use of your RSS Reader, we advised on the best places to find open data, and we looked at business development 2.0 and marketing 2.0 trends.

Yesterday on this blog Sarah Perez wondered how important is offline access for web apps? Her conclusion was that offline access is important now, but not as important as it once was. And that with the increasing ubiquity of Internet access, it is growing less important every day. I won't dispute that, but there is an important distinction to be made between offline access to web apps (as Google Gears provides) and desktop access to web apps (as Mozilla's Prism and Adobe's AIR provide). The latter is a very important step in the evolution of web apps.