ChrisShaul.com

Web 2.0 - Brave New World…

It has been awhile since I last posted. I finally found a cool reason to post. Stumbling around the internet I find many cool things. One thing that I knew about but really hadn’t taken advantage of was Google’s Docs and Spreadsheets. I am most impressed with the fact that you can write a document and save it to the web. Better yet, you can write a document and post it to your blog! Thus this posting was written entirely in Google’s Doc Writer. Pretty cool!

It is interesting in that Google and another group called Ajaxwrite are competing for the Web 2.0 (online apps) version of Microsoft Office. No longer will you need applications on your computer locally. You will only need a connection to the internet and a web browser. In the Enterprise Software space, this would have been called an Application Service Provider, or Hosted Applications. Now, I think it is simply called Google

It will be interesting to see how these new applications unfold. You can currently use a Document Writer, a Spreadsheet Viewer, and even an online music player (like iTunes). Soon though, more and more software will be “on-demand”. It will be interesting to see how much privacy people are willing to give up to use these new applications. Of course, all of these systems are protected, encrypted, and guard dogged. But just like any other data, it can be lost, stolen, corrupted, etc. Is the public that trusting? My guess is yes. They share their private photos online, so why not their thoughts too? Hmmm Brave new world we are living in…