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- Copyright Hunter Strategies LLC
After a false start during the late 90’s, the idea of Web applications replacing desktop (and server) applications is back with a vengeance with increasingly pervasive broadband access making Web applications useful for more than just big business and Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) Web programming providing user interfaces of nearly desktop quality. Today, Forbes has a article on The Best Web-Based Computer Applications For Small Business that reviews of the state of play for Web applications in the categories of:
I won’t spoil the ending, but let’s just say that Google walks away with the honors in every category where they compete except for word processors where Google’s recently acquired Writely comes in second to Zoho Writer (a product of AdventNet).
Knowing the best of the crop is nice, but the big question is always, “Are they good enough?” Forbes’ answer:
But don’t throw away your desktop applications just yet. As a general rule, Ajax sites simply aren’t as powerful or as useful as their desktop counterparts. Spreadsheet jockeys, for example, will want to stick with Excel for the foreseeable future.
But we also found surprising power and features in these sites. For example, Zoho Writer is in some ways superior to Microsoft Word, because it automatically creates an HTML version of your document on the fly and handles images better. And Gmail can give any desktop e-mail program a run for its money.
In general, if you’re looking to collaborate on documents, or share calendars, these sites can’t be beat. Nothing on your desktop compares with them.
Also, keep in mind that most of these applications are still in beta mode (in fact, a couple insist they’re alpha), and so they may change radically over the coming months.
The sharing advantage of Web applications is a refrain you will frequently hear repeated.
Nearly rivaling the number of new VoIP services are the Internet video sharing services that seem to pop up daily. When it comes to video, I’m strictly a consumer, not a creator, but one can’t help but notice all the YouTube embedded videos appearing on blogs and elsewhere. To attempt to bring order out of the chaos, Digital Video Guru reviews 10 Internet video sharing services (out of the at least 40 available):
Hit the link for all the details on a variety of considerations, but for my interests this sums it up:
For posting: If you just want to get a video clip online and share it with friends via email or on your own blog, Vimeo wins for its speed, ease-of-use, and simple playback functions.
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For viewership: If you want to step up to more community features and get widespread viewership of your viral clip, YouTube gets the job done…
Is it nostalgia for the 90’s or am I caught in a time warp? Google has resuscitated the “build yourself a free home page service” concept with a spiffy AJAX Page Creator and mercifully without the annoying ads that were the hallmark of such services in the past. Chris Sherman has the details at SearchEngineWatch:
Google Page Creator is a web based application that uses a basic what-you-see is what-you-get style of interface, designed to allow anyone to create and publish web pages, regardless of skill or knowledge level.
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Google Page Creator is a web-based application that runs on any computer or operating system. To use it, you must have a Google account and a Gmail address. Pages that you create are stored on Google servers using a URL convention of gmailname.googlepages.com.Each user is provided with 100 megabytes of free storage space, and while there is a limit on the amount of bandwidth a site is allowed, Rosenstein says he doubts most people will ever reach the limit. The limit is primarily in place to foil the efforts of spammers, he said.
There are few restrictions on the type of content Google will allow users to publish, though Rosenstein said there won’t be any mechanisms for ecommerce or interactivity.
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Pages hosted on Google Pages are ordinary web pages, and will be included in Google’s (and presumably other search engines) web index, though they won’t be given any special treatment in ranking.
Despite their best intentions, I think they are going to have a problem with various forms of abuse. However, a bigger question is, why? Google already has the free Blogger service for would-be webloggers, so the suspicion is that it’s market positioning against the wildly popular MySpace. If so, they are going to need more than a few generalized web site templates to play the interactive user community game.
As for the other players, Yahoo and Lycos still have those golden oldies, GeoCities and Tripod, complete with the annoying ads. The real question is if or how the big names are planning to compete with MySpace.