Metaverse continued ...

I've recently came upon this site: http://www.youos.com/

and this site: http://www.ajaxwrite.com/

and I've found these to be absolutely exciting. The YouOs is absolutely great. They redefined the concept of an operating system.

I think what needs to happen is for applications to break out of the browser. YouOs, and AjaxWrite are a beginning of this. What is the point of the browser. It is a very heavy and limiting medium. What if you created a browser wrapper, something that lives neither here nor there. With Ajax taking over, it is possible to move a piece of the website to your desktop and work with that chunk as if it was a real application running on your PC. The whole browser is only confusing the matter. It's really not needed. A browser is nothing but an interpreter in an interpreted language. The only difference is that, right now, the browser is also imposing a look and feel and is constraining the interaction between the user and the service.

Imagine a powerful application like the AjaxWrite. Now remove the browser, and create a link on your current desktop that instead of opening a browser just runs the app. The app decides the look and feel, etc... I know there are security concerns, but for the sake of progress I would rather ignore them for the moment. Now, you have a part of your desktop running a web-based application. The whole thing is running on some other server, and you are simply interacting with it. The difference is that you have a seemless integration with your environment.

At the moment, there is such a clear separation between desktop and web. In my opinion, they really are the same thing. What is the difference between running something locally and running something remotely and only bringing back the display. Both systems react to the user events, the only difference, is that the desktop system is bound to your machine.