Webtops

Flavour of the moment? Harbinger of a web-services world where everything is "out there"?

I was led to this topic by a serendipitous post on the Open University H80x alumni mail list. This recommended three rss readers:

• ProtoPage
  
• PageFlake
  
• 30Boxes

But, these were not just news readers. These applications provide a "webtop" working environment. As long as you are connected and have a browser you can log in to your webtop and have a personalised set of tools.

Have a look at, "Continuing to play around with Webtops and becoming convinced that they are the interface of the future" on e-Clippings (link), According to Mark Oehlert Webtops are:

1. Easily deployable
   
2. Easily updatable
   
3. Goes anywhere a browser goes
   
4. Thin, thin, thin
   
5. Application-level functionality in a broswer

And Stephen Downes blogged this a week ago Continuing to play around with webtops. The point he makes is that "...what we are seeing in the commercial products - 30Boxes, PageFlakes, ProtoPage, Goowy - is remarkably similar to what we are seeing (in concept, at least) in personal learning environments."

A webtop and writely? Is it all you need?

This led me to storage. These days 1 Gig is just a freebie... but that is another story.

Comments

[Tony Hirst]

I agree that webtops offer a really exciting proposition in terms of their PLE potential (I even mooted a Netvibes/PLE competition, but no-one picked up on it... http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/007055.html) especially when combined with other (free) online services (something i thought of as ad hoc VLEs (http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/005963.html))

But maybe the future is even more radical than that? See for example this post on possible future home/personal computing policies:
http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/007293.html

[Jimmy]

A very interesting webtop (OOS) can also be found at http://www.oos.cc It includes several applications like mail-, task-, contact- and filemanagement.

Kind regards,
Jimmy