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… with every passing day! Today we aren’t just storing data online, but are now using applications that run straight off the web to work with that data. At this stage in the evolution of web applications, we’ve done a very good data to store and manipulate textual data online. There’s very little of that kind of stuff on my hard disk any more. Consider this:

I’m typing this post in my Gmail “compose” window, since I can post to Blogspot using a secret email address (Blogger drives this weblog). To take quick notes, jot down ideas, I use Google Notebook. To write longer documents, more elaborate posts, papers, articles and the like, I turn to Writely. My email (my rahul@rahulgaitonde.org account is now hosted by Google at www.google.com/hosted) is now online. It used to be a POP3 account, and I used to download mail to my Thinkpad and use Thunderbird, but no longer. My address book is, of course, stored online too. My bookmarks are no longer a long list in Firefox. Instead, I use del.icio.us.

I am now at a point where for most of my day-to-day work, the computer I use does not matter. At home, I can use the Thinkcenter, my Thinkpad, I can walk across the street to the Internet Cafe, or for that matter the access terminals at most International Airports, and continue from where I left off. The same applications, the same data. We can now see the ultimate goal in the distance - making Data independent of Device!

What’s next? There are two imperatives: 1.) Better tools for storing and working with other multimedia - pictures, videos, music, and such. 2.) Providing mobile interfaces to each of these appliations.

I’m now migrating all the pictures in the “My Pictures” folder to Flickr. However, Flickr, although very good, doesn’t quite match up to the simple, humble Windows Explorer for managing pictures, so forget about competing with applications like Picasa. There are elementary things we’ve learnt to do, such as pre-fetching pictures in a slideshow, and smooth Flash interface (Flickr), but we still need improvement. Managing bandwidth effectively, for instance. The same goes for managing videos with YouTube. We’re still one or two evolutionary stages away on that front.

As far as music goes, we have most of the infrastructure in place. But we’ve got to think beyond simply translating the local HDD paradigm into an online thing. Most efforts today are about providing online space (in addition to eliminating duplicates), and then streaming to a player. Bob Cringely had examined a few applications late last year, but all of them are based on the old paradigm. Why buy a CD, rip, upload, and then stream back?

These are some problems we’ve got to solve for any medium richer than text. But we’re getting there, we’re getting there!