the thing about innovation is that once it exists, you can't realy ever imagine life without. Life before cell phones? Life before atm's? The whole new web evolution (web 2.0, ajax, etc) is like that.

Every day i'm seeing apps that blow me away - and then become almost immediately essential. Take Google Calendar. Built in sms alters, built in natural language 'quick links', and the ability to share your info with with your friends, family, and co-workers. Of course.

Then you go to Riya. FAce recognition for photo's. Impossible? Nope. done. and elegant too. then there's pixoh, a browser based photo editing tool.

I said on these pages a few weeks ago that Vista miss it's launch date was a big deal. And in my gut knew that there would be a number of advances that would move the world from a desktop centric universe to a browser based world. Welll, it's happening, and you can hardly stop yourself from being charmed by the ease, elegance, and pure fun of these new browser based web applications.

Coming along quickly are a whole collection of tools that will create platforms for collaborative creation of content. YouTube and Google video are leading the way with simple upload and storage solutions. Video Egg has downloadable app that makes upload and video sharing a snap. And now motion box and jump cut are adding to the mix with browser based editing tools.

This is not trival stuff.

We've been talking for a long time about the importance of a shared space for creative collaboration.

and now the pieces are coming together to make that a reality.

What makes this phase in the webs development so interesting is that many of these web 2.0 application are truely collabverative themselves (example - www.alexaahonic.com) sites that add layers of services and new capabilities to existing sets of data or collections of resources. Sure this new shared desktop environment is complex uncharted territory (note the battle with Veoh over 'scraping' video). But there's lots of incentive for newly intertwined serivces to find business models wher e they share revenues in proportion to the value they bring.