Web2.0: Free Of The Desktop?

My Thinkpad died after apparently one too many Linux distro installations (I was adding a new one about every other day for a while). As a long-time Mac user in a Windows world, adding another OS to the mix made sharing files an often frustrating experience. With much more emphasis on compatible formats, moving from Mac to Windows to Linux and back again is relatively painless these days. And yet, maybe the real promise of Web2.0 is to make the OS irrelevant.

Cory Doctorow describes himself as "someone who lives in his browser." I would put myself in that category as well and have been messing around with the idea of creating my own application service provider ever since I first heard that term back in the 90s. I love the idea of using any cpu as a terminal on the net where all my data and applications are stored.

Here are a few of the apps that are making this more possible all the time:

• gmail - now with nearly 3GB of storage, my current storage of over 1000 messages is only using 12% of capacity. At the rate that the service continues to upgrade capacity, I may never come even close to tapping out this service. Of course, Google may be running algorithms on all of us that will soon create a Minority Report world where we are bombarded with highly customized ad-sense commercials everytime our rfid-embedded brains pass a location-aware plasma screen.
  
• google calendar - with nice integration with gmail and the ical standard, this is a shareable and syncable web calendar that seems to get the job done for now and is sure to improve over time.
  
• del.icio.us - still the best social bookmarking / tagging service for my money (as in none since it's free)
  
• thinkfree online - this is a seriously cool product that I just started playing with over the past couple weeks. Despite the slower start time, this nifty little web app kicks Writely's ass by allowing you to create, share and store (up to 1GB for now) MS Office compatable docs, spreadsheets and presentations all using a relatively intuitive interface that duplicates the look and feel of ThinkFree's destop product (which is very similar to its Office counterpart). It even has wiki-type versioning history and allows you to post to a remote blog too.
  
• openomy is one of a bunch or new data storage services on the web these days. Openomy is written in Rails gives you a nice interface and 1GM of free storage.
  
• bloglines is still my favorite web-based RSS reader. It is incredibly easy to use and is one of the first things that I open when I am traveling or just have a quick minute to check in with what is going on in the world (or at least the world that I am interested in)
  
• So this sound great for common productivity tools but web-based apps will never replace apps like iTunes to play the music you have, right? Actually, Pandora, BlogMusik and similar apps to come might be even better to help you explore music you don't have (and both are free, at least for now)
  
• E-Messenger and KoolIM are a cool web-based instant messengers that allows you to IM with AIM, MSN, and Yahoo (including Yahoo Beta) without dowloading any client software.
  

With web-based applications and data storage that enable us to work and play beyond the desktop, could the "OS wars," and maybe the OS itself, soon be a thing of the past?

- sean