ice crums

What is desktopization? The tendency of web apps to do “desktop collaboration”. This is not to be confused with the destopfying of web apps with Flex or AJAX. For this to grow to it’s full extent, three main ingredients are important (continue reading after the jump).

Data Portability and Collaboration

In a any OS data streams freely among apps (Macs are a great example). Your contacts from Address Book app are accessible by any other app using the Cocoa class (i.e. iCal, Delicious Library, Mail). This is the final step towards a true Web OS. The Web OS is not going to be a desktop-like environment like the ones portrayed by eyeOS or Desktoptwo, but rather different apps hosted apart that can collaborate easily amongst each other.

An easy example is photo editing web app from Picnik and collaboration with Flickr and facebook hosted pictures. Now imagine being able to build other apps that can work simultaneously without developers having to learn another set of APIs to increase cooperation with different services, but rather use a industry standard protocol to communicate different accounts and files among apps. As things stand now, this collaboration is possible, but developers would need to deal with separate APIs for each service.

Data Portability Group’s philosophy statement says:

As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen (and trusted) tools or vendors. We need a DHCP for Identity. A distributed File System for data. The technologies already exist, we simply need a complete reference design to put the pieces together.

Some of the big players that recently joined this consortium are Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Plaxo.

ID Management

The other building block is OpenID, which is a single user id and password for all your accounts. With all your services spread out into the internetz it’s going to be very important to keep them all under one roof for easy access. This one is actually a no brainer(we all suffer from missing user id and/or password…even with 1Password’s help)

App Oriented Web Browser

For web apps to gain access to our daily lives(and for non-techies) they are going to merge even more with our current operating environment. There are two key components: dedicated browsers and offline operations.

This is where the new generation of single web app browsers comes in. There are currently several out there, but the most talked about are: Fluid (Mac only, built on WebKit) and Prism (Mozilla foundation).

On the offline mode front there are several companies trying to become the industry standard. For one there’s Google Gears which has successfully been used with Zoho Office tools. AIR from Adobe is reaching new grounds with it’s overhyped “build once, run everywhere” framework (where have I heard that before?). Microsoft is dipping their toes with Silverlight and their new Sync Framework. Other like Joyent have frameworks like Slingshot specifically for Rails apps.

By combining these three factors we will see the web and desktop fully merge for maximum productivity and connivence for the users, rather than the developer’s interest(monopolistic agendas….someone say facebook?).