In the desktop client, Seesmic integrates lists in its sidebar. To add a list to the deck, you just click on the name of the list. Using these userlists is just as easy as creating a persistent search in Seesmic. Seesmic has also added the option to add users to a list right from the desktop.

This is still an early build and some features are still missing. Seesmic's CEO and founder Loïc le Meur told us that Seesmic's users had been asking for basic lists support and that the company wanted to get this feature into its users' hands as soon as possible. Because of this, some features haven't been implemented yet.

In the build we tested, we couldn't create new lists, for example. For now, list columns also don't update themselves. Instead, users will have to reload them manually. As le Meur told us, users would quickly hit their API limits on Twitter if the lists auto-updated. The company is working with Twitter to find a better solution. For now, the lack of auto-updating lists is an annoyance, but not a deal-breaker.

Le Meur stressed that this was still a preview version and that the company plans to ship more comprehensive support for lists in the final build.

Coming Later Today

If you want to give it a try, just sign up for Team Seesmic and you'll be notified when the new build arrives.

Hulu Desktop

The crown jewel of these new apps, though, is clearly the Hulu Desktop application, which works exceptionally well and is extremely well designed. A lot of similar applications have relied on Adobe AIR and were often nothing more than just the web app packed into a stand-alone browser. But Hulu actually developed native apps for both Windows and Mac, and the result is noticeably better than what the Hulu team could have achieved by using AIR.

For the most part, users can navigate the app with just the arrow keys and the space or enter button (or a Windows Media Center or Apple remote). Hulu's video quality has always been quite good, and the desktop app basically replicates the same basic experience as watching a video from the site in full-screen mode, but with a number of additional functions such as being able to quickly bring up more information about a video that is currently playing.

Overall, using the Hulu Desktop makes for a very nice experience, even though we sometimes felt that it took too many clicks to find and start a video.

Hulu and Boxee

Of course, it is hard to talk about Hulu and desktop apps without mentioning the company's conflict with Boxee, another popular desktop app that allows users to stream videos from a large number of sites. Hulu blocked Boxee's access to its videos in February, though by now, Boxee has found a work-around to still display the site's content in its application.

Cutting the Cable

Given that more and more households are now cutting their cable connections in favor of connecting their computers directly to their TVs and playing videos from Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and other sources, the release of this application is timely. Though, in the end, we would assume that most users who decide to go without cable would prefer apps like Boxee or MythTV because they would give them access to all their media files instead of having to switch between different apps.

Unlike most social networks, which are based around preexisting relationships, FileRide focuses more on shared interests. Instead of having to go out and find like-minded people, however, your music collection or your favorite YouTube videos already form the basis of these relationships. FileRide also features groups for different topics.

FileRide's desktop program runs in the background and notices whenever you copy and paste a file, image, or link. In these cases, it will pop up an alert and give you the option to add these files to FileRide. Links to YouTube videos will automatically be filed into their own 'YouTube' category on the service. Of course, you can also drag and drop your MP3s or other documents onto the FileRide desktop directly to add them to your list.

For songs and images, FileRide creates digital fingerprints, so that users can still 'gather' around these media files, even though the files might have different names. Supposedly, these fingerprints even work across different file types (think MP3 and AAC files, or different bitrates for songs), though we weren't able to test this yet.

Overall, FileRide's feature set is impressive and we barely have the space to touch upon its core services here. It includes a micro-blogging service, a Facebook-like wall (the 'Smorgasbord'), the ability to subscribe to newsfeeds from your friends and groups, as well as desktop alerts when new chats or comments appear in a group you follow. The desktop software will also display relevant blog posts and Wikipedia entries.

Soon, FileRide will also be able to recognize ISBNs and other contexts. FileRide's development team also plans to integrate Spotify's music service soon.

Sign up by November 30

FileRide is also taking an interesting marketing approach. Instead of launching the service with a private beta, sign-ups will only be open until November 30th and after that, the FileRide will become invite-only, so if you want to try the service out, now is the time to sign up.

Verdict

We can't blame you if you are skeptical about yet another social network, but we have been testing the service for a while now and have been quite surprised by how well the concept works. As is typical for these social services in their early stages, the current number of users hasn't quite reached the critical mass yet where you can expect a constant stream of comments and updates. However, as FileRide's founder Patrik Hedmalm told us, since its launch a few weeks ago, the service has been growing steadily thanks to effective word of mouth marketing.

In addition to the video feeds, there's also a live feed from FOX News Talk Radio. Another nice feature is the breaking news alerts. When the app is minimized, a small window will pop up from time to time when there's breaking news. The pop-up window will show the headline and the video. If you want to tune in, just click on it. If you ignore it, it will disappear in a moment or two. If that feature annoys you or you just need a break from distractions, you can easily turn it off from the Alert Settings in the app.

The last notable feature of the AIR app is the sharing feature. If you catch a video that you want to share with your friends, you can simply click the "Share" button to send them the video via email. Your friend receives a link to the video stream. The link delivers them to a page on the FOX News web site where they can watch the stream live.

If you want to check out this app yourself, you can download it from here. You will need to have Adobe AIR installed in order to install it.

Is the desktop of the future going to just be a web-hosted version of the same old-fashioned desktop metaphors we have today?

No. There have already been several attempts at copying the old-fashioned "files and folders" desktop interface to the Web, but they have not caught on. Imitations desktops to-date have simply been clunky and slow imitations of the real-thing at best. Others have been overly slick. But one thing they all have in common: None of them have nailed it.  People don't want to manage all their information on the Web in the same interface they use to manage data and apps on their local PC. The Web is an entirely different medium than the desktop and it requires a new kind of interface. The desktop of the future - what some have called "the Webtop" - still has yet to be invented.

The desktop of the future is going to be a hosted web service

Is the desktop even going to exist anymore as the Web becomes increasingly important? Yes, there has to be some kind of place that we consider to be our personal "home" and "workspace" -- but it's not going to live on any one device.

As we move into a world that is increasingly mobile, where users often work across several different devices in the course of their day, we need unified access to our applications and data. This requires that our applications and data do not reside on local devices anymore, but rather that they will live in the cloud and be accessible via Web services.

The painful process of using synchronization utilities to keep data on our different devices in-synch will finally be a thing of the past. Similarly an entire class of applications for remote-PC access will also become extinct. Instead, all devices will synch with the cloud, where your applications, data and desktop workspace state will live as a unified, hosted service. Your desktop will appear on whatever device you login to, just as you left it wherever you last accessed it. This shift harkens back to previous attempts to revive thin-client computing -  such as Sun Microsystems' Java Desktop - but this time it is going to actually become mainstream.

The Browser is Going to Swallow Up the Desktop

It's a classic embrace-and-extend story - the Web browser began as just another app on the desktop and has quickly embraced and extended every other application to become the central tool on everyone's desktop. All that remains is the desktop itself - and the browser is quickly making inroads there as well. In particular Firefox, with it's easy extensibility and huge range of add-ons, is rapidly displacing the remaining features of the desktop.

If these trends continue, will the browser eventually swallow up or simply replace the desktop? Yes. In fact, it will probably happen very soon. There just isn't any reason to have a desktop outside the browser anymore. What we think of as "the desktop" is really just a perspective on our information and applications - it's really just another "page" or context in our digital lives. This could easily exist within a browser. So instead of launching the browser from the desktop, it makes more sense to launch the desktop from the browser. In this way of thinking, the desktop is really just our home page - the place where we do our work and keep up with our world.

The focus of the desktop will shift from information to attention

As our digital lives evolve out of the old-fashioned desktop into the browser-centric Web environment we will see a shift from organizing information spatially (directories, folders, desktops, etc.) to organizing information temporally (feeds, lifestreams, microblogs, timelines, etc.). The Web is constantly changing and the biggest challenge is not finding information, it is keeping up with it.

The desktop of the future is going to be more concerned with helping users manage information overload - particularly the overload caused by change. In this respect, it is going to feel more like an RSS feed reader or a social news site than a directory. The focus will be on helping the user to manage and keep up with all the stuff flowing in and out of the their environment. The interface will be tuned to help the user understand what the trends are, rather than just on how things are organized.

Users are going to shift from acting as librarians to acting as daytraders.

As we move into an era where content creation and distribution become almost infinitely cheap, the scarcest resources will no longer be storage or bandwidth, it will be attention. The pace of information creation and distribution continues to accelerate and there is no end in sight, yet the cognitive capabilities of the individual human brain are finite and we are already at our limits.

In order to cope with the overwhelming complexity of our digital lives, we are going to increasingly rely on tools that help us manage our attention more productively -- rather than tools that simply help us manage our information.

It is a shift from the mindset of being librarians to that of being daytraders. In the PC era we were all focused on trying to manage the information on our computers -- we were acting as librarians. Filing things was a big hassle, and finding them was just as difficult. But today filing information is really not the problem: Google has made search so powerful and ubiquitous that many Web users don't bother to file anything anymore - instead they just search again when they need it. The librarian problem has been overcome by the brute force of Web-scale search. At least for now.

Instead we are now struggling to cope with a different problem - the problem of filtering for what is really important or relevant now and in the near-future. With limited time and attention, we have to be careful what we look for and what we pay attention to. This is the mindset of the daytrader. Bet wrong and you could end up wasting your precious resources, bet right and you could find the motherlode before the rest of the world and gain valuable advantages by being first. Daytraders are focused on discovering and keeping track of trends. It's a very different focus and activity from being a librarian, and it's what we are all moving towards.

The Webtop will be more social and will leverage and integrate collective intelligence

The Webtop is going to be more socially oriented than desktops of today -- it will have built-in messaging and social networking, as well as social-media sharing, collaborative filtering, discussions, and other community features.

The social dimension of our lives is becoming perhaps our most important source of information. We get information via email from friends, family and colleagues. We get information via social networks and social media sharing services. We co-create information with others in communities. And we team up with our communities to filter, rate and redistribute content.

The social dimension is also starting to play a more important role in our information management and discovery activities. Instead of those activities remaining as solitary, they are becoming more communal. For example many social bookmarking and social news sites use community sentiment and collaborative filtering to help to highlight what is most interesting, useful or important. 

Sites such as Digg, Reddit, Mixx, Slashdot, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Twine, and many others, show that collective intelligence may be the most powerful way to help individuals and groups filter content and manage their attention more productively. The power of many trumps the power of one.

The desktop of the future is going to have powerful semantic search and social search capabilities built-in

Our evolving Webtop is going to have more powerful search built-in. It will of course provide best-of-breed keyword search capabilities, but this is just the beginning.

It will also combine social search and semantic search. On the social search dimension, users will be able to search their information and rank it via attributes of their social graph (for example, "find documents about x and rank them by how many of my friends liked them.")

Semantic search on the other hand will enable more granular search and navigation of information along a potentially open-ended networks of properties and relationships. For example you will be able to search in a highly structured way -- for example, search for products you once bookmarked that have a price of $10.95 and are on-sale this week. Or search for documents you read which were authored by Sue and related to project X, in the last month. The semantics of the future desktop will be open-ended. That is to say that users as well as other application and information providers will be able to extend it with custom schemas, new data types, and custom fields to any piece of information.

Interactive shared spaces will replace folders

Forget about shared folders -- that is an outmoded paradigm. Instead, the new metaphor will be interactive shared spaces. These shared spaces will be more like wikis than folders. They will be permission-based environments where one or many contributors can meet, interact synchronously or asynchronously, to work on information and other tasks together.

There are many kinds of shared spaces already in existence, including discussion forums, blogs, social network profiles, community sites, file sharing tools, conferencing tools, version control systems, and groupware. But as we move into Web 3.0 these will begin to converge. We will store information in them, we will work on information there, we will publish and distribute information through them, we will search across them, and we will interact with others around them.

Our next-generation shared spaces will be nestable and linkable like folders, but they will be far more powerful and dynamic, and they will be accessible via HTTP and other APIs such as SPARQL enabling data to be moved in and out of them easily by other applications around the Web.

Any group of two or more individuals will be able to participate in a shared space that will appear on their individual desktops, for a particular purpose. These new shared spaces will not only provide richer semantics in the underlying data, social network, and search, but they will also enable groups to seamlessly and collectively add, organize, track, manage, discuss, distribute, and search for information of mutual interest.

The Portable Desktop

The underlying data in the future desktop, and in all associated services it connects, will be represented using open-standard data formats. Not only will the data be open, but the semantics of the data - the schema that defines it - will also be defined in an open way. The value of open linked-data and open semantics is that data will not be held prisoner anywhere: it will be portable and will be easy to integrate with other data. The emerging Semantic Web and Data Portability initiatives provide a good set of open standards for enabling this to happen.

Due to open-standards and data-portability, your desktop and data will be free from "platform lock-in." This means that your Webtop might even be portable to a different competing Webtop provider someday. If and when that becomes possible, how will Webtop providers compete to add value?

The Smart Desktop

One of the most important aspects of the coming desktop is that it's going to be smart. It's going to have to be. Users simply cannot handle the complexity of their information landscapes anymore - they need help. There are a range of tasks that the desktop should automate for users including: organizing information, reminding users when necessary, resolving data conflicts, managing versioning, maintaining data quality, backing up data, prioritizing information, and gathering relevant information and suggesting it when appropriate.

Most other features of the future desktop will be commodities - but intelligence will still be difficult to provide, and so it will be the last remaining frontier in which competing Webtop providers will be able to differentiate their offerings.

The Webtop is going to learn and help you to be more productive. As you use it, it's going to adjust to your interests, relationships, current activities, information and preferences. It will adaptively self-organize to help you focus your attention on what is most important to whatever context you are in.

When reading something while you are taking a trip to Milan it may organize itself to be more contextually relevant to that time, place and context. When you later return home to San Francisco it will automatically adapt and shift to your home context. When you do a lot of searches about a certain product it will realize your context and intent has to do with that product and will adapt to help you with that activity for a while, until your behavior changes.

Your desktop will actually be a semantic knowledge base on the back-end. It will encode a rich semantic graph of your information, relationships, interests, behavior and preferences. You will be able to permit other applications to access part or all of your graph to datamine it and provide you with value-added views and even automated intelligent assistance.

For example, you might allow an agent that cross-links things to see all your data: it would go and add cross links to relevant things onto all the things you have created or collected. Another agent that makes personalized buying recommendations might only get to see your shopping history across all shopping sites you use.

Your desktop may also function as a simple personal assistant at times. You will be able to converse with your desktop eventually -- through a conversational agent interface. While on the road you will be able to email or SMS in questions to it and get back immediate intelligent answers. You will even be able to do this via a voice interface.

For example, you might ask, "where is my next meeting?" or "what Japanese restaurants do I like in LA?" or "What is Sue's Smith's phone number?" and you would get back answers. You could also command it to do things for you -- like reminding you to do something, or helping you keep track of an interest, or monitoring for something and alerting you when it happens.

Because your future desktop will connect all the relationships in your digital life -- relationships connecting people, information, behavior, preferences and applications -- it will be the ultimate place to learn about your interests and preferences.

Federated, open policies and permissions

This rich graph of meta-data that comprises your future desktop will enable the next-generation of smart services to learn about you and help you in an incredibly personalized manner. It will also of course be rife with potential for abuse and privacy will be a major function and concern.

One of the biggest enabling technologies that will be necessary is a federated model for sharing meta-data about policies and permissions on data. Information that is considered to be personal and private in Web site X should be recognized and treated as such by other applications and websites you choose to share that information with. This will require a way for sharing meta-data about your policies and permissions between different accounts and applications you use.

The semantic web provides a good infrastructure for building and deploying a decentralized framework for policy and privacy integration, but it has yet to be developed, let alone adopted. For the full vision of the future desktop to emerge a universally accepted standard for exchanging policy and permission data will be a necessary enabling technology.

The personal cloud

One way to think of the emerging Webtop is as your personal cloud. It will not just be a cloud of data, it will be a compute cloud as well. When you need to store or retrieve information it will provide that service. When you need to do computations, it will provide that to you as well. The cost of harnessing the capabilities of your cloud may be based on a monthly subscription or it may be metered, or it may be ad-supported.

Your personal cloud will have a center - provided by your main Webtop provider, where your address will live -- but most of its services will be distributed in other places, and even federated among other providers. Yet from an end-user perspective it will function as a seamlessly integrated service. You will be able to see and navigate all your information and applications, as if they were in one connected space, regardless of where they are actually hosted. You will be able to search your personal cloud from any point within it. It will look and feel like a single cohesive service.

The WebOS

No discussion of the future of the desktop would be complete without delving into the topic of the WebOS. The shift from desktop to Webtop - the move from a local desktop to a hosted desktop - is a necessary step towards the entire operating system moving to the Web as well. Many of the services that comprise an operating system are already available as Web services, but they are not yet integrated into a single cohesive WebOS. However it seems clear that the major players are aware of this opportunity and are positioning their services to capture it. Just as the desktop OS wars were won by capturing the "high ground" of the desktop, I would not be surprised if the same principle holds in the battle to own the WebOS. Whomever wins the Webtop will win the whole stack.

Who is most likely to own the future desktop?

When I think about what the future desktop is going to look like it seems to be a convergence of several different kinds of services that we currently view as separate.

It will be hosted on the cloud and accessible across all devices. It will place more emphasis on social interaction, social filtering, and collective intelligence. It will provide a very powerful and extensible data model with support for both unstructured and arbitrarily structured information. It will enable almost peer-to-peer like search federation, yet still have a unified home page and user-experience. It will be smart and personalized. It will be highly decentralized yet will manage identity, policies and permissions in an integrated cohesive and transparent manner across services.

By cobbling together a number of different services that exist today you could build something like this in a decentralized fashion. As various services integrate with each other it may simply emerge on its own. But is that how the desktop of the future will come about? Or will it be provided as a new application from one player - perhaps one with a lot of centralized market power and the ability to launch something like this on a massive scale? Or - just as with the previous desktop hits of the past, will it come from a little-known upstart with a disruptive technology? It's hard to predict, but one thing is certain: it is going to happen relatively soon and will be an interesting process to watch.

Image via Arnaldo Licea

Don't be fooled - this is app is no ordinary desktop music player. Instead of simply streaming tunes, Fanbase lets you connect with other users through an integrated chat feature while also viewing a continuous feed of both the official and the unofficial news, photos, and videos. You can also customize the app by choosing which artists you want it to display from the dropdown menu or the "Manage" screen.

To create Fanbase, Atlantic Records collaborated with imeem, the music social networking site that lets users upload, create, and listen to music. Through the integrated imeem music player, Fanbase will automatically capture the latest music from any particular artist and stream it directly into the player. Fanbase's video content comes from YouTube and Brightcove and the chat feature is provided by Meebo.

"We're always looking to elevate the experience and interaction our fans have with our artists," said Eric Snowden Creative Director of Digital Media for Atlantic Records. "Through Fanbase we're delivering that experience digitally, on-demand and in a manner that allows fans to create a much deeper connection with their favorite artists."

We only wish that an app as rich as Fanbase wasn't limited to just one record label - a collaborative effort between labels would have really made Fanbase a killer app. However, if your favorite artist is with Atlantic Records, you may want to give it a shot. To try Fanbase for yourself, you can download it from here.

The SmartDesktop application is designed to be used by individuals who to assist with organization of emails and files by project. (A framework for developers is also available). The application only works on Windows machines and supports the following applications:

• Microsoft Outlook 2003, 2007
• Microsoft Word 2003, 2007
• Microsoft Excel 2003, 2007
• Microsoft PowerPoint 2003, 2007
• Microsoft Visio 2003, 2007
• Microsoft Project 2003, 2007
• Internet Explorer v6, v7
• Mozilla Firefox v1, v2, v3
• Adobe Acrobat v6, v7, v8
• Adobe Reader v7, v8
• AutoDesk AutoCAD 2007, 2008
• Compatible with Google Docs
• Compatible with Zoho Sheets

While traditionally a software program like this would stick to only supporting other desktop software, the company seems to have taken note of the online office trend and has decided to branch out from being solely tied to the machine to support some cloud apps as well. With support for both Google Docs and Zoho (only Zoho Sheets, unfortunately), there's a chance for SmartDesktop to succeed among the online crowd as well. That is, assuming they continue to add support for online services, including the rest of Zoho's suite.

To really benefit from a program like SmartDesktop, you need to have a lot of data stored in files across both the web and your machine and no time or inclination to organize it on your own. But you don't need to work on "projects" to use SmartDesktop; it is meant to organize anything that you're working on, whether personal events, managing clients, doing research, planning a budget, etc. In SmartDesktop, a "project" is just the container for the files, email, and web pages that are related to each other.

This structure takes SmartDesktop beyond being just another desktop search app. Instead of just scanning your hard drive for keywords, it starts with a project-oriented view of your information and doesn't even index the information you haven't touched. This way, search results are faster and contain much less noise.

Will SmartDesktop really help people deal with information overload? Those interested in finding out can can sign up to be alerted when the beta is made available for download: just click here.

Until now, only users with paid Yahoo Plus accounts had POP access to their email. Now, all Yahoo users will get offline access to their accounts through the Zimbra Desktop via the arguably superior IMAP protocol.

Yahoo bought the email and messaging company Zimbra for $350 million in September 2007, soon after Zimbra had launched its offline capabilities. The Zimbra Desktop runs on top of Prism, a Mozilla Labs product, which, just like Gears, is meant to allow users offline access to their web applications.

Besides working with Yahoo mail, Zimbra also supports all other IMAP and POP capable accounts, as well as, of course, accounts hosted on a Zimbra server. Zimbra has predefined settings for Gmail, AOL, and Yahoo accounts.

Still Beta

After one alpha and two beta releases under Yahoo, Zimbra is still calling this new version a beta, but given that fact that they are releasing it to all Yahoo users, the company must feel pretty good about the stability of the application. In our tests, we did not experience any crashes or other problems with the Windows and Linux client, though we did not test the Mac version.

The Zimbra Blog also lists a large number of other updates and new features to the application, including built-in notifications, minimize to tray on Windows, showing the number of new mails in the tray, and a few other minor updates.

Only Mail

One thing that is still sorely missing though (or at least we couldn't find it), is syncing calendars, tasks, files, contacts, etc. Yahoo is surely planning to do this in a future release, but right now, this does reduce the usefulness of the Zimbra Desktop quite a bit.

Why Zimbra Only?

The big news, however, is definitely that all Yahoo users now have offline access to their email accounts. Of course, cynics might point out that all Yahoo would have to do is flip one switch and all its users could just use any email client they wanted for offline access. Those same cynics might point out that Yahoo is mostly doing this to justify the $300 million investment in Zimbra. However, at least Yahoo's users now have one option to get offline access to their messages.

Oliver Goldman recently posted an entry on his Adobe company blog, declaring:

"Adobe AIR supports enterprise deployment. There; I've said it. We've had a bit of trouble getting this message out, so I wanted to be clear about this right up front."

Curious about what kind of apps were really being used in the enterprise, we contacted Adobe to get some details. What we found out was that several big name companies have already starting using AIR on the corporate desktop, using apps to provide everything from real-time informational updates to employee directories. Below is a look at some of the apps in use today.

Enterprise AIR Apps

Employee Directory

Of course, one of the first deployments of AIR is going to be at Adobe, where they've been dog-fooding their own platform for a while now. At Adobe, one of the apps that they use is an employee directory which shows employee names, titles, details, photos, presence, and where that person is in the company hierarchy. Companies wishing to build their own employee directory app can use the sample app available here to do so.

Employee Directory Sample

Sales Team Apps

Another application used by Adobe and others is an app built for the sales team which allows them to enter customer issues, prioritize them, escalate them, and track them. The beauty of this app is its capability for offline mode - something which would benefit any sales team. When offline, sales professionals can enter in issues, and when they're back online those issues get synced back to the company's servers. To get started building an application for a sales team at their own company, a developer can access the Salesbuilder app available here.

Salesbuilder Sample App

Executive Dashboard

At Sharp in Japan, company employees use an executive dashboard built on AIR that shows things like incoming orders, inventory levels in different warehouses and factories, and the throughput of that inventory through every stage of the production process. (No screenshot available)

Customer Account Updates

In the finance industry, the international corporation that is Deutsche Bank has deployed Adobe AIR to their desktops which lets employees actively monitor activity on their customers' accounts. The AIR solution provided a better alternative to what they had used prior - a browser-based application that required hitting the "refresh" button to see updates. Said Mike LaCava, Director and Global Head of Internet Channels in Global Transaction Banking at Deutsche Bank, AIR let them "leverage the power of the desktop and the Web to immediately deliver customized desktop notifications that will keep our clients well-informed and empowered while they carry out their daily activities."

NASDAQ Market Replay

Another real-time use of AIR in the finance industry comes from NASDAQ, where an AIR app called NASDAQ Market Replay lets financial professionals replay market activity in detail at any point in time - even drilling down into an individual stock to view its historical performance. Here, AIR shows its ability to work with an extremely large data set, which is something that wouldn't be quite as instantaneous in a browser.

NASDAQ Market Replay

Apps for Salesforce

SaaS technology and services company, Model Metrics, has released an on-demand AIR application that leverages salesforce.com's new PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) Force.com to build an app called Accelerate4Pharma. This app is designed for the pharmaceutical marketing, sales, and customer service processes. Again, it was the online/offline switching capabilities that prompted the company to choose Adobe AIR and Flex.

Model Metrics Accelerate4Pharma

While those are just a sampling of apps, there are still other companies using Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR, including: Atlantic Records; BBC; Business Objects; FedEx Corp.; Loyalty Management Group (Nectar); Nickelodeon/MTVN Kids and Family Group's Neopets; and Wilson Sporting Goods.

Sample & Featured Apps

For any company wanting to deploy AIR apps internally, the Adobe Developer Center features code and sample apps for numerous applications like Lineup, an app that lets you browse your Exchange calendar; S3E, an app that provides a simple user interface for reading, writing, and deleting files stored on Amazon's S3 data storage services; Timeslide, an app that delivers notifications to the desktop; and more.

You can also get access to completed, business-ready AIR apps like Agile Agenda, a project manager application; SearchCoders, a forum reader, blog reader, chat client, notepad, and bookmark manager designed specifically for developers looking for Flex-related information; among others.

Deploying AIR

For I.T. admins, getting the Adobe AIR apps to the desktop is as easy to do as using whatever deployment tools are already in place, like IBM Tivoli or Microsoft SMS. The redistribution site has more details on this.

These installations can even be customized in three different ways: 1) Enable/disable automatic AIR updates (good for locked-down environments), 2) Enable/disable the installation of AIR applications (to limit users to the apps already on their machines), and 3) Enable/disable the installation of AIR applications with unknown publishers (to limit users to only installing apps from known publishers.) More information is available in this whitepaper. (P.S. On the last page is an email address where you can bug Adobe for GPOs, which aren't available yet).

As far as making any pre-built apps for SMBs available, Adobe isn't there yet, and they may never be - they typically just provide technologies for others to build upon. However, there is a chance for seeing more productivity apps in the future in the same vein as the current acrobat.com AIR app (which, by the way, is really worth the download).

Acrobat.com AIR App

UPDATE: Adobe AIR for I.T. Administrators just launched today.

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Web Apps

Google App Engine: History's Next Step or Monopolistic Boondoggle?

The big news this week was the launch of Google App Engine, "a developer tool that enables you to run your web applications on Google's infrastructure." This will allow startups to use Google's web servers, APIs, and other developer tools to build a web app on top of. Google clearly has the scale and smarts to provide this platform service to developers. However, it begs the question: why would a startup want to hand over that much control and dependence to a big Internet company? Check out Marshall's analysis.

A new feature at ReadWriteWeb is an interactive game helping you to understand and contextualize web tech news in a fun way. This week we posted, via a new app from Impact Games, an interactive game that will let you model Google App Engine's impact in the marketplace. You can play the game here.

Our other coverage: Google App Engine: Cloud Control to Major Tom; HuddleChat: Did Google Just Rip Off 37Signals? and Google Takes Down HuddleChat After Complaints About 37Signals Ripoff

Related: Red Dog: Microsoft's Answer to App Engine and AWS?

How to Get Customer Service via Twitter

There has been a lot of talk lately of companies monitoring social media, be it Twitter, blogs, or social networking sites, for mentions of their company name and responding to customer service issues. Some of this interaction has been in the Twitter community, with Comcast being one of the more active participants as of late. Although in some cases, customers twittered their frustration after failing to receive the support they needed through traditional methods, in many cases, Twitter was the first place the customers vented their frustration, and then were surprised when they received a response from a support rep or company spokesperson.

Related: 5 Ways to Find More Friends on Twitter and Twittermethis Is A Brilliant Marketing Experiment

Seven Tips for Making the Most of Your RSS Reader

RSS is a big deal, as anyone who's subscribed to even a few feeds probably knows. Once you get past just a few feeds, though, it can quickly get overwhelming. RSS can leave you feeling inadequate, brain-dead and uninspired. Trying out new things will help you discover new, magical experiences, though. Letting go of the stress caused by any obligation to read everything will go a long way.

Here are seven tips for making the most of your RSS reader, from simple to more complex.

SEE MORE WEB APPS COVERAGE IN OUR WEB APPS CATEGORY

Web Trends

How Important is Offline Access, Anyway?

In today's world, you're never too far from an internet connection. In developed countries, broadband access is available in more places than ever, and even poorer countries have internet cafes sprouting up left and right. Modern web workers and business travelers even take extra precautions to maintain always-on connectivity - packing air cards in their laptop bags or buying laptops that already have built-in EVDO access.

Despite the broad availability of internet access, it's the dead spots that have been pushing forward the need for offline access to web apps. For how can a web office suite like Google Docs or Zoho compete with desktop software if they become unusable when the internet connection disappears?

Why We Need Web Apps on the Desktop

Sarah Perez conclued in the above post 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. However Josh Catone thinks 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.

Where to Find Open Data on the Web

This week there was a story on Techmeme entitled "We Need a Wikipedia for data". The article, written by X-Googler Bret Taylor, discussed the difficulty of finding open data sets on the internet, something which could spur innovation, allowing programmers to build new applications the likes of which have never been seen before. What was interesting about this story, in addition to, obviously, the concept of a Data Wiki itself, was the amazing and insightful commentary around this concept, not just on the blog, but all over the net, something which led to the discovery of some pretty good data sources that are already available.

A Guide to Business Development 2.0

At least once each day I get a call from someone trying to sell me outsourced development services. It's difficult to not be frustrated with these calls and it is increasingly hard to be polite, because they come so frequently. Yet, more than frustrated, I am just puzzled. Does this tactic still work? Who in this day and age would give business based on a cold call? These companies could definitely use a dose of business development 2.0.

Related: Marketing 2.0: Can Meebo Make it Real?

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

• It will actually help make web apps more popular.
• Running a ton of apps in the browser at once is a pain.

The Desktop is the Key to Making Web Apps Mainstream

As I commented in Sarah's post yesterday, for those of us who read blogs like ReadWriteWeb, using web apps has become second nature. Putting data in the cloud makes sense, and the thought of being offline for more than 10 minutes per day seems ludicrous. But I suspect that's not the case for everyone.

For many mainstream users, I think the idea of storing your data in the cloud is kind of creepy (that's the word my girlfriend used the other day when I was explaining to her how things like Google Docs work). Giving those people access to the software in the traditional form of a desktop application will, in my opinion, help push them gently toward web applications. Get them hooked on Google Docs on the desktop, convince them of the convenience of having anywhere access to the app on the web, and then you might start seeing people really embrace web apps as they get more comfortable with the idea.

The conversation I had with my girlfriend went something like this (paraphrasing heavily here):

Her: "So where are my documents stored?"
Me: "On Google's servers."
Her: "And I don't actually own the software?"
Me: "No, you just sort of rent it."
Her: "So if Google goes down, or decides to stop making Docs, they take my software and documents with it?"
Me: "Theoretically that could happen, yeah."
Her: "And if there's a security breach my documents are there for the taking?"
Me: "Technically, yes."
Her: "That's kinda creepy.... I don't think I like that."

I think that's a fairly standard view among mainstream software users. So, desktop access becomes important as a means to an end. Web apps will have a much smoother road to mass mainstream adoption if offline/desktop versions are used as a bridge.

The Browser is No Place for Multitasking

Looking at my Windows taskbar right now, I have copies of Thunderbird, Trillian, Photoshop, FeedDemon, Notepad, Word, Winamp, and Twhirl running. Sure, I could run web app equivalents of each of those in the browser -- GMail, Meebo, Aviary Phoenix, Google Reader, Docs, Pandora, and a Twitter module in Netvibes might suffice. But they'd all be running in Firefox at once (oh, Firefox is also running on my system right now).

Managing those apps from the desktop is pretty simple. Managing them all at once in Firefox would be a nightmare, and would likely start to make Firefox unstable and act naughty. That's precisely the reason FreshBooks launched a desktop app today using Mozilla Prism. "One thing I hear occasionally from our users, especially Web professionals, is that running a bunch of browser-based apps at once can be a particular pain when the browser decides to misbehave," wrote Freshbooks developer Rich Lafferty.

As Mitch Grasso, founder of Sliderocket (our coverage) wrote in a comment here yesterday, "Adobe AIR isn't just about taking apps offline. Multi-window support, drag and drop, keyboard shortcuts, and access to the rich clipboard are all things that you take for granted in a desktop app are difficult or impossible to do in a browser. Browsers are designed for reading webpages - not hosting applications."

There might be a day when the web truly is our operating system, and when browsers really will be designed to run multiple applications. But that day hasn't arrived, and until it does, bringing web apps to the desktop is another important step in their evolution and the way forward in pushing the idea of hosting data in the cloud out to the mainstream.

Conclusion

There is a third reason desktop/offline access is important: web access isn't yet ubiquitous. There are plenty of times when connecting to the Internet just isn't happening, and having access to your data and your software on the desktop is definitely beneficial during those times. But, as Sarah wrote yesterday, no access is becoming more the exception than the rule. Every day offline access is becoming less and less important for applications, but desktop access is still necessary.

What do you think? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.