Webware

When the Israeli-Palestinian Webtop Ghost made its official beta launch Tuesday, it got us wondering what happened to all those other such Web desktops that have launched in recent years.

Several of them are still around. At least half a dozen are trying to prove what many doubt--that there's a market for a virtual desktop with built-in applications and widgets, plus communications and collaboration tools, all served via the browser.

Among those CNET News reached, Glide OS is now the biggest, with about 1 million users, followed by Desktoptwo with 200,000 users, Ghost with 180,000 users, Icloud with 170,000 users, Startforce with 70,000 users, and Cloudo with 30,000 users.

Though the numbers aren't overwhelming, they indicate at least some interest.

On the other hand, a couple of Webtops we've reported on, Jooce and AjaxWindows, appear to be out of commission, or at least their Web sites are. And one of the best known, You OS, called it quits last summer.

Yet those still standing believe their time is now slowly coming.

"What we've noticed in the last four months is that with virtually no media coverage, we've had a steady upsurge and it's purely viral," said Donald Leka, founder and CEO of TransMedia, which runs the Glide OS.

But Ray Valdes, research director at Gartner Research, is skeptical.

"I have not seen growth or traction among the Webtop companies over the past year," Valdes said. "From a long-term perspective, I don't see any change to current market trends, which are that Webtop ventures are not gaining market traction."

Still, investors are watching the Webtop market closely.

"We have a tremendous interest from venture capital," Leka said, underlining that TransMedia so far is wholly angel-funded. "Repeatedly we get calls on a weekly basis."

And Daniel Arthursson, CEO and founder of Icloud developer Xcerion, said his company just raised new capital from new and existing investors, including Northzone Ventures, which invested $10 million in 2007.

Though the Webtops are similar, each has its own approach. ... Read more

My hat goes off to Preston Monroe, the developer of iCopy, an online service that adds cut and paste functionality to the iPhone's browser and e-mail apps. As you probably know, Apple's handheld computer bizarrely omits this feature.

Cut-and-paste on the iPhone, via a Web service.

(Credit: iCopy video)

iCopy is a clever hack that lets you select text or a link from a Web page and paste it into another page, or an e-mail. It gets around the lack of iPhone-native copy and paste by sending selected text to a temporary online repository when you "copy," and retrieving it when you "paste." In operation, it's a horrible kludge--it requires a lot of Web page switching and too many visits to the iCopy site to do a simple copy/paste operation. But the fact that Monroe figured out a way to make the Web a giant clipboard in the sky is pretty cool.

iCopy illustrates that while the Web can be employed to do a lot of things that we've formerly thought of as belonging solely in the domain of local computing, it doesn't mean we should do so.

I edit a blog about Web 2.0 apps. It's my job to push the vision of Web-based products and cloud-based resources. But even I realize that local processing has a place. I find it curious that many people I talk to think Microsoft's rumored Midori project, for instance, is a "cloud OS." While there's no question that an operating system written from the ground up today should use Internet resources in a more native fashion than most OSes do today, the change should be seen as one of degree, not replacement.

The Internet can be used to deliver apps and updates, for storage and backup, for social networking and person-to-person communications, and other functions. But for the moment and the near future, you need local processing to maintain speed and robustness of applications, and native graphics capability to present the interface. One of the reasons Web 2.0 apps can work well today is because today's browsers have deep user interface and graphics capabilities, and because they run on powerful local PCs. Many popular Web apps--like Google Docs and Microsoft Live Search Maps--rely on capabilities that were simply not present in PCs only a few years ago.

That's why I continue to refer to Web operating systems like G.ho.st as science fair projects. They're really cool, and they provide glimpses of the evolution of personal computing. Much of what we do on a PC today can be done over the Web. But a lot cannot, at least not well. To deliver the best experience--the best user interface, reliability, collaboration, and so on--smart developers don't force all their apps either onto the Web or the local PC. Today's architectures make distributing applications among platforms easier than ever. They even make it possible for apps to adapt to their environment and redistribute themselves depending on circumstance (see Google Gears). The really interesting upcoming apps and operating systems will not just be hybrid (online/offline), but adaptive.

Meanwhile, if you're interested in how copy and paste might work on the iPhone, check out Proximi's Magicpad, a text editing app that offers cut and paste controls. Proximi has also published video proposing a user interface for general cut and paste on the iPhone. This is the work Apple should have done. Although for all we know, the company has done it already, but in secret.

Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher put Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer up on stage first thing at the D6 conference, and by doing so, let them set the agenda for the operating system discussion here at the show.

Microsoft's duo didn't do a great job of capitalizing on that position. Rather, they left a lot of room for other companies to excite the audience with newer ideas. Two companies here are taking on that charge.

Ghost
The first, Ghost, demo'd Wednesday. Its product is a "virtual computer," as the company calls it. Hosted at Amazon Web Services, it's designed to be everything you need from a computer, except it's not on your computer. You get a file system (with 5GB of storage for free), a media player, and links to some apps. For example, if you want to edit a word processing file, you can launch it into Thinkfree or Zoho.

The fact that Ghost doesn't come with a bunch of its own apps is the key to this product, and what makes it more like an actual OS than many other Web-based OS experiments I've seen. The design goal of Ghost is that it acts as the clearinghouse for all your Web app accounts, letting you shuffle data between them. For example, if you have a document in Zoho Writer and want to edit it in Google Docs, Ghost will make the transition automatic. If you want to drag a file from your Flickr account into your Ghost file store, and later to an e-mail, Ghost will do that, too.

The Ghost desktop looks--and works--a lot like Windows.

The interface for all of this runs within a browser, and that's the only place it will work at first. There's no offline version, and one of the venture funders for the company said the team doesn't believe that online/offline synchronizing will work with typically forgetful users (although a company representative later told me they're considering talking to Sharpcast to offer sync capability). Ghost is being built to be the one true glue that holds all your online apps together.

Also, Ghost is cool since it's a Palestinian/Israeli collaboration.

The company plans to make money through affiliate deals for the services it links to.

Answering the obvious question--How do you change user behavior to get them to move their computing to the cloud?--the founders respond that people have already moved their e-mail behavior online. So it could happen to productivity as well.

Like many other Web-based operating systems, it's a compelling demo but a confusing marketing pitch. The "you don't need your own computer" line doesn't work all that well when everyone has their own laptop already. Ghost is a very long bet. It is not a product for today (and it's still in early alpha testing anyway), but it is one of the most interesting Webtops I've seen, and more OS-like than most.

Glide
The second company, Glide, will showcase its new service on Thursday. Glide is more of Web application suite than a Web OS. It's more mature than Ghost, and more comprehensible to the average user today.

The new "Glide OS 3.0" is a fairly complete Web-based desktop, with a word processor, a presentation app, a spreadsheet, e-mail, calendar, media players, and so on. I was critical of the apps in Glide's early versions, but they do keep getting better. Glide also has a rights management system built into its system, which lets users closely control what happens to their documents if they choose to share them.

Unlike Ghost, Glide has an offline version, and a sync engine that keeps your online and offline files in lockstep. Glide works on mobile devices, and the offline apps works on PCs, Macs, and Linux devices.

The Glide desktop is a bit more polished, reflecting the fact that it's already in its third major revision.

Glide does not offer real-time collaboration, like Google Docs does, though.

These two suites show two different approaches to building Web-based app platforms. Ghost is a glue app--really more like an operating system than a suite, since the idea is that you run your favorite apps through it, and use it to manage your file storage and sharing. Glide is an app suite--the Microsoft Office of Web apps.

Glide has a full app suite. Its word processor is shown here.

Of the two projects, the Glide direction is more comprehensible. Users get that it's a competitor to paid productivity suites. Ghost is far too novel an idea for mass adoption; and I do worry that by the time users are ready for it, its strongest capabilities--data transfer and universal online storage--will be typical features of online apps. But it is, still, the more interesting idea and the bigger bet.

Meanwhile, Microsoft continues to gingerly explore online extensions to its core suite. And although I have been known to complain about the glacial evolution of the architecture of its application suite, in truth it's probably moving at close to the right pace to keep users onboard.

Microsoft could not do Glide today. It wouldn't work for its business. And it certainly couldn't do Ghost (although it's possible that Microsoft Live Mesh [stories] is an early move in this direction). But these new Web-based operating systems do show us where Microsoft must eventually move because that's where many of its users will be going.

See also: Xcerion, Startforce, YouOS, EyeOS.

Click here for full coverage of the D: All Things Digital conference.

I still don't fully get the whole Web operating system concept. Why run an OS inside a browser when your browser is running in an OS to begin with? But AjaxWindows, a Web OS and application suite that launched today, makes a very good case for the Web OS. It's not ready yet for adoption by the world at large, but the idea behind it, and some of the features in it, are too interesting to write off as just yet another science project.

Ajax13, the company that makes AjaxWindows, was originally started to create Web-based applications. It made a word processor, sketching program, and a presentation application. Founder Michael Robertson realized that making yet more productivity applications (see also: Google, ThinkFree, Zoho, etc.) wasn't a Most Likely to Succeed strategy, so he's rolled these applications into an ambitious Web-based operating system. It worked for Microsoft, I suppose.

It looks like a desktop OS, but it's really a very fancy Web service.

The AjaxWindows environment is a very convincing (if slower) simulation of a real desktop OS. It lets you (or simulates, I can't tell) open multiple applications in different windows, and if you expand AjaxWindows to full-screen, it really does look a lot like a real OS, with no visible remnants of the underlying Web browser. But there's more to it than just looking and feeling like Windows or a Mac. AjaxWindows' cool tricks are its storage capabilities, its synchronization to your local PC, and its support for other applications and widgets.

The system even has a Windows-like Start menu.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

AjaxWindows stores its files in Google's Gmail. Considering Gmail's free storage (over 2.5 GB), that's clever, even if Google wasn't consulted for this application. AjaxWindows, and its native applications, store everything except music files in Gmail (Music is stored on MP3Tunes). Syncing your local PC's data files to your online workspace is a snap with the OS' built-in Synchronizer function, which neatly runs without requiring a standalone application download. Your workspace can also get synchronized with your browser's bookmarks, and to even your desktop background and your Windows startup sound.

Beyond AjaxWindows' own applications, your workspace comes preconfigured with links to several Google applicatiosn (such as Docs, Calendar, and Maps), as well as to Zoho Start (review) and other useful Web 2.0 applications like Meebo. But these non-Ajax13-made applications are not integrated into the experience. Clicking on Google Docs opens up the Web application in a new browser window, and files stored in Docs aren't visible on the AjaxWindows file explorer. That's ironic, considering where they are stored. Likewise, you'll need a separate sign-up for non-Google-base applications, like Meebo.

There's also an element of NetVibes with AjaxWindows. You can add widgets, like RSS feed windows and small games, to you desktop. Unfortunately, widgets written for popular platforms like Netvibes and Pageflakes don't work in the AjaxWindows system.

AjaxWindows is an interesting experiment. For users who want to take their desktop with them without carrying any hardware, it's an incomplete if tantalizing solution. The synchronization feature makes it a usable tool if you're OK with using only the Ajax13 Web applications, since unless I missed something, the other applications on the desktop can't access the synced files. (If you really want to avoid lugging a computer, you could also put your applications and working data on a USB thumb drive and get much of the same benefit.) Until more applications, their storage systems, and their sign-on mechanisms get more tightly integrated into this Web platform (see the OpenSAM initiative), AjaxWindows--and other Web-based "operating systems"--will likely remain a curiosity. This is, though, a decent start towards building a truly computer-free personal computing platform.

See also:
• Jooce (review)
• Startforce (video)
• YouOS (review)
• DesktopTwo (review)
• Glide Effortless (review)
• Goowy and YourMinis (review)

I got my hands on an early build of the Web operating system Jooce this week. I find this class of product interesting, but I've yet to see one that's really compelling. See also: Startforce (video), YouOS (review), DesktopTwo (review), Glide Effortless (review), and Goowy and YourMinis (review) .

The concept is elemental Webware: Web OSes, at least in theory, put all the heavy lifting an operating system usually does on a server somewhere on the Net, while the interface gets funneled through a browser. With a Web OS, you don't need to worry about any additional software or storage on your local computer. This means any browser-equipped machine can become your personal machine with a simple log-in. And since all of your data is stored centrally, it's also generally easier to share and collaborate with others.

The Jooce Web OS is easy on the eyes, and it's easy to use.

The downside is speed and the availability of apps. Jooce, in its current, pre-pre-release stage, is a Web OS that appears to have done a good job solving the speed issue. But I didn't see any serious applications to work with it.

Turn the page on Jooce: From your private desktop to your shared space.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The Jooce UI is built in Flash and is nice-looking and easy to use. It's also got a clever sharing feature: Each user gets two workspaces by default: private and shared. You can easily move files between them to make them available to others, and a quick mouse-click rotates your workspace between the two spaces, much like user switching on Mac OS. (In fact, the default desktop background is a pretty blatant ripoff of the blue swoosh on the Mac desktop.)

At the moment, there are no Jooce apps to play with aside from a multi-service IM client, a file uploader, and some media players, but Jooce CEO Stefan Surzucki told me that their platform enables apps to easily talk amongst themselves, so you won't have the collection-of-separate-widgets that you get on single-page aggregators like NetVibes. But somebody's going to have to come up with good ideas to implement, and then build those apps. I can't tell yet if that will be easy, or hard, or if anyone is yet lined up to do so, especially considering the explosion of app and widget platforms that developers now have to worry about.

... Read more