The_web_becomes_my_desktop

For a long time, I have been using Yahoo! Mail as my only personal email platform (no email client).

After having used Gmail for some time, now I realize that my personal stuff is more and more on the web:
- I use Google Notes to take notes
- I use Google Calendar
- I use Gmail as personal Todo list (using a todo and a done label)
- I use netvibes Webnotes
- I upload my important documents on my website, in Yahoo Briefcase, in Google Docs or I email them to myself (since there is virtually no size limit anymore)
- My knowledge base is built using my blogs that I aggregate in a Wiki on my website
- My bookmarks are in Del.icio.us
- My Contacts are now in LinkedIn, Plaxo and Facebook
- Most of the information I need comes from the web or from my company's Intranet

The only things that remain on my computer are the Office Documents, the pictures and the email archives. If I would upload all my pictures on Picasa or Flickr, I'd very close to have nearly nothing on my computer anymore.

If the Internet tone becomes as reliable as the phone tone, environments like DesktopTwo (https://desktoptwo.com) will actually become our computers. Desktoptwo provides you a virtual computer on the web, with the advantage that the only thing that you need is an Internet connection to access your virtual computer. All your documents remain on the server and are backed-up, archived...

You will find the same kind of concept in the WebOS eXoplatform (http://www.exoplatform.com/) : "This new giant step is an important one in the process to make the network the computer".

At JavaPolis, James Gossling said concerning Google that nobody could have predicted that the killer app of the web would have been "Advertisement". Maybe the next killer app is the computer itself, swallowed by the network, the servers becoming fully pervasive.