C3 's- "Feeds I Digg "

Three new killer apps

I’ve been looking at a few new net applications very recently, and although each could easily merit an entry on its own, I thought I’d review them together in order to try and draw some general conclusions.
Which columns do you wish to search?
First a9.com which is a new search facility from Amazon. Second is gMail - the new browser-based email service from Google. Third is a combined blog, wiki and forums application called Bloki.

First up, a9.com which is a new search facility from Amazon. As with many alternative searches, the underlying engine is just good old google again, but Amazon have added two things. One thing is Search within books, which is something I was awed to discover on the amazon site recently - you can look up quotes from stuff you know youve read in a book somewhere and find out who wrote it and where. Web Books Images Yellow Pages Reference Movies Blog Search Wikipedia Your History Your Diary Your Bookmarks 43 Things About.com Top Blogs Creative Imagine how powerful that will be when the entire British Library is digitised.

The second added value feature is that a9.com remembers all of your previous searches, no matter which computer you are using. That may not seem like a big deal but the potential is to replace bookmarks and link lists with something that you can more conveniently carry around with you.

Second is gMail - the new browser-based email service from Google. Those of us who have a Blogger account can beta test this now, and it doesnt feel anything like a beta at all, you can tell that masses of work of has gone into it already. Im not going to deal with the privacy issues which have been raised, they remind me of all the fuss kicked up about cookies, scripting and other things which we learned to live with. The great thing about gMail is the way it manages to function more like a proper email client application than a clunky slow browser mail service like yahoo or hotmail. Expanding and collapsing messages happens within the loaded script rather than having to back out ont o the web each time you do anything, and you can use keyboard shortcuts too. Instead of storing all your messages ( up to 1Gb worth) in folders, you have labels, filters and searches to get at anything you�ve ever received or written in seconds.

Third is a combined blog, wiki and forums application called Bloki. Not exactly new, but new to me Bloki has some very professional looking functionality. The interface for editing the wiki pages and blog entries is entirely WYSIWYG, so anyone who has only ever used a Word Processor will find it familiar, no need to delve into Markup tags at all. WYSIWYG editing of web content from your browser has to open up enormous potential for getting more people involved in collaborating to pool information and build knowlege. Bloki accounts are free with no advertising at present, and the response times seem reasonable but rather worrying is that the index of user accounts reveals a large number which have been abandoned some time ago. Also, you have to register and log in to contribute, which is a big turn-off for many potential parrticpants. On the plus side, the President of the company behind it, Zapatec , contributes to the independent yahoogroup user forum.

So now for the synthesis. All three of my designated killer apps run within a browser and store data on the server side. If this is the future then all we will need is a relatively dumb computer anywhere with internet access and a password to access everything we need. Its the end of the installed application, followed by a film at eleven. All we have to do is trust all of our personal data to Google, Amazon and the like, just like we do already with various web hosting organisations, ISPs and education institutions.
There is an issue over which browsers are capable of performing all this new functionality. My favourite Safari is discounted for the time being by both Google and Bloki. So is my default windows browser, Opera . Internet Explorer 6 is acceptable but Micro$oft are not investing in its future so the way forward i starting to look like Mozilla and Firefox. Mac users, who already have to fall back on IE when Safari fails may have to make room for a third browser sitting on the dock. Firefox is multiplatform and fully open source ( unlike any of three apps reviewed here), whereas Safari uses the open source code from Linux's K-Desktop Environment (KDE) Konqueror browser only for the superfast rendering.