Google Tools

[GRDadof3]

Some pretty cool stuff found here:

Google Labs

Google Suggest is wild, and gives you real time key word suggestions as you enter your search criteria.

[jbr12]

Wow, they have some sweet stuff in there... Google Suggest is definitly going to change how people search the 'net. They are slowly taking over the world, one application at a time

[Allison Slater]

Holy crap if they made a mobile version of google ride finder...

Google transit looks promising as well. If they could combine that with something like mapquest, and actually implement into something widely used, perhaps more people would actually use mass transit.

[AlexPKeaton]

Google Suggest has been around for probably a year now. I think it was probably put together as more of a proof of concept than anything.

-nb

[vexom]

The thing I think is going to take over is Google docs and spreadsheets. There are many benifits to having these sort of apps as web apps. For one you can say goodbye to file attachments in the work enviroment. No more 5 versions of the same file in which one person will have to put everything together again in the end by figuring out what was changed in each. No more program dependencies, the great thing about web apps is they work the same on everybodys computer that has a web browser so there is no need to worry about which version of MS Office the person might have and even if they do have MS Office. Oh and no more hundreds to thousands of dollars to MicroSoft for software that is not even close to being worth that much and no more paying for upgrades as well. Another cool thing is Google docs and spreadsheets can inport and export current MS Office files. I'm telling you this is the future of office productivity.

[AlexPKeaton]

Well, I think their web apps make a lot of sense for simple uses and sharing and collaboration. That is killer, sure. But as a web developer I can tell you that web applications will never be as feature rich, functional, or usable as desktop apps. At least not with the state of the web right now. Both have their place.

I think we may see a new generation of applications that make use of web services to provide a lot of the collaboration tools without sacrificing the benefits of a "real" application.

Why does the web suck so much for application development? I guess my simple explanation is that HTML was designed to represent documents. A web page is just a document. The web wasn't designed to be an application platform, and to make it work that way isn't very pretty. It can be done, and often is (e.g. Google's apps), but it isn't very easy.

Funny enough, Java was supposed to be the next big thing that would allow applications to run on any computer over the web. For whatever reason it never lived up to that vision.

-nb