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Lately, I have found that I rarely have a need to use desktop software for any of my computing needs. These are the online-based services that I have found to be indispensable in my everyday life to organize, communicate, and stay informed.

• Google Gmail - I can access my mail from home, work, Wi-Fi hotspot, my iPhone.
• Google Calendar - Anything that relates to time/date/place/to-dos, it goes in my Google Calendar.  I can access this from practically anywhere.
• Google Reader - This is my online RSS Newsreader. With Google Gears offline support, I can catchup with all the latest news feeds even when I am on a plane.
• Del.icio.us Bookmarks - I find that I have not bookmarked a page in IE or Firefox in ages! Instead, all my bookmarks are on this handy service.
• MP3tunes - All my iTunes music safely stored and synced online with MP3tunes.com.  I can stream my music from the Internet.  This service doesn’t store and sync my iTunes videos and movies, so I use other means to backup and sync these files.
• .Mac - I use the iDisk service to keep any storage of files and folders that I need to access from anywhere.  The one other feature that I do like is the Photo sharing capabilities.
• SlingBox - Ok, its not really an online service, but its how I watch TV now.  Place-shifting means I can watch TV shows streamed online from any single Slingbox location.  Place one SlingBox hardware in your parent’s home in Canada and you can catch international TV right on your computer.  Quality is not the greatest, as it depends a lot on the upload speeds of the SlingBox locations you are getting the streams from.
• Google Docs - This service can almost replace your traditional Microsoft Office apps. Unfortunately, it is not as speedy as having a desktop app.  Speed and offline portability are the biggest factors in me not completely switching over to using online-based office apps.
• Google Alerts - This is how I read the latest news. I give search terms that I find most interesting, and everyday they will send me the top links to news stories and blog entries that match my keywords.
• Kayak - I give it my top flight destinations and the maximum price I am willing to pay, and I get a daily report of any matching deals.
• Twitter - This service is basically a mashup of fan site / blog / and alerting service. You can alert all your followers via SMS text, IM, and email with “what you are doing now”. I am still a little weary of letting everyone know what I am doing now, but I can see how it can be used to alert a large number of people at once, with whatever information you wish to share. This is most useful for people with a mobile lifestyle, who may not get a chance to post their thoughts to a blog.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how web browsers have become the central strategy for much of Web 2.0 and the Mobile 2.0.  Cloud computing is the next major step for many tech companies’ strategic roadmap including IBM. One of the biggest contributors to this surge is Mozilla’s Firefox web browser.

Why has Firefox surged to  the top?  Two things. Add-ons/extensions, and tabbed browsing.  I cannot even imagine browsing the web without these innovations.  Those two simple ideas have made my online experience a sheer joy.  My top ten add-ons include:  del.icio.us, Foxmarks, Adblock, Google Browser Sync, Google Gears, Google Notebook, Operator, Greasemonkey, Firebug, and User Agent Switcher.

The upcoming FIrefox 3 also promises new innovations to make browsing even more simpler and useful. The aptly named “Awesome Bar” is indeed awesome.  You just start typing in anything that you’ve accessed in your browser URL, and it comes up with possible suggestions.  Unlike type-ahead, the suggestions you get can come from any position in the URL (not just the first n characters). Also, the performance and security enhancements are much needed as pre-Firefox-3 browsers had started to become slow.  I remembered the primary reason that I had switched from IE to Firefox back in the day was because Firefox 1.0 was so much faster than IE 6.0.  Performance is as much part of the user experience as UI. You can have the prettiest user interface, but if the user has to wait longer to get their information, they will perceive the product as crap.

Mozilla’s next phase is to rule the mobile browser space. The space is already crowded with the likes of Webkit, Opera, Pocket IE, etc. How awesome will it be to be able to keep those Add-Ons while surfing the mobile web on any smartphone platform. That’s Firefox’s bread and butter.  That’s what will make them successful in the mobile web 2.0.

Well.. here’s my public FriendFeed that you can use to follow everything that I do online.

Spooky, eh? If there’s only one RSS feed that you want to keep track of my online world, this is it.  Looks like a very promising web service. It allows you to make and keep track of comments for all your online feeds that you subscribe to. All your feeds and conversations in one place. Interesting…

Here’s some press about the Blue Business Platform (a project that I was involved with for the past year and a half). To summarize:

IBM said the marketplace will offer pre-integrated products and services from IBM and independent software developers. Customers will be able to use the software they buy on premises or in the cloud.

IBM is working with Google to build a worldwide network of connected servers, an architecture sometimes referred to as a computing cloud, from which it plans to deliver software and services.

The online store will be organized geographically and also by industry. Customers will be able to purchase software or services in just four clicks, IBM said. The company plans to pilot the marketplace throughout 2008

Read more about this from various sources online:

• IBM To Launch Web-Based Application Market - InformationWeek
• Google, IBM Join Forces To Dominate Cloud Computing - InformationWeek
• IBM to Build Apps Marketplace for SMBs - PCWorld
• IBM launching a platform for SMB opportunity - IT Business

Continuing the theme of mobile web 2.0, here’s a presentation from Dan Appelquist at the Web 2.0 Conference on April 24, 2008. Another must read for those of us interested in the mobile web development space.

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Get ready people! In the next few years, we will be witnessing the birth of the mobile web 2.0. The mobile lifestyle will finally become a reality. New business models will emerge, and companies that keep this in mind will flourish.

What I know is that there hasn’t been much innovation in the field of pervasive computing or the idea that mobile devices can be used to access your computer applications, anytime, anywhere. There are many software applications that target only specific devices, such as Palm, Windows Mobile, Symbian, etc. Interoperability and device/platform independence has been difficult to attain. Software developers who wanted to write mobile applications had to target specific platforms. However, the web browser is the single application that ties all these devices together.

The notion that the “network is the computer” is starting to become more of a reality. We just didn’t see it happening that much till now. The World Wide Web is having a resurgence due in part to “Web 2.0“, “AJAX“, and all these “community-based“, “social-driven” web applications. This is partly because high-speed Internet access has become more ubiquitous and accessible to the masses. Web browsers on non-mobile platforms are commonplace and have recently had some incredible technological capabilities that allow web applications that mimic traditional desktop applications.

In the world of mobile computing, we have had a different experience. Surfing the web on mobile devices was very limited to whether mobile phone vendors would provide the necessary infrastructure and capabilities for these phones. In many ways, this is still the case. Web usage on mobile devices has had a slow rate of adoption due in part to data plans being too expensive, web browser features and support still in its infancy, fragmented web page markup language support (WML, xhtml, etc), and lack of any killer apps. However, in less than a few short years, I believe that will change.

A few years ago, the wireless data infrastructure was still slower than 56kbps. At least today, we can’t complain that the wireless data infrastructure is slowing things down, because many of the next-gen networks are capable of some very impressive speeds. I am also starting to see some very good things happen that may usher in the new mobile web 2.0 era that we are about to embark.

This past year, Opera made an announcement that it would start making their mobile web browser more AJAX-friendly and included many Web 2.0 technologies such as RSS feeds, and JavaScript widget support. Opera makes their “paid-version” mobile browser software available on pretty much all the major phone vendors out there, and they even make their “free” Opera Mini browser available as a Java ME midlet application. This means they have their footprint in pretty much all the mobile devices out there. On the Windows Mobile platform, they already ship default with Internet Explorer mobile browser which is already capable of rendering web pages without needing websites to create WAP-friendly versions. The difference between Opera Mobile and Internet Explorer for smartphones, is that Opera is incorporating exciting new features that are key to Web 2.0, while Internet Explorer is stagnant and built for Web 1.0.

What we really need now is to have the web developer community start making those killer apps. Google has taken the lead by making many of their web applications mobile-friendly. Gmail and Google Maps have recently been ported to the Java ME specification. Also, an innovative new company called Soonr leverages the power of Opera’s capability for mobile AJAX to create an interesting class of applications used for VOIP communications. Of course, other things need to also happen. These so-called smartphones need to be everywhere. Unlimited data plans from mobile carriers need to be much cheaper. There’s nothing worse than getting a huge bill from your provider because you thought the 10 MB data plan was enough.

The other good thing I am seeing is that Apple is readying their rumored iPhone. This smartphone will supposedly have a mobile OS based on their desktop Mac OS X operating system. I can’t help but think that this will help explode the smartphone market, in the same way that the iPod has exploded the personal MP3 player market. Imagine a Safari Mobile browser that can render AJAX-enabled web sites. This could be the catalyst needed to usher in the new era of the Mobile Web 2.0.