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I just can't wait to taste it, to have a feel of it right in my desktop. Yes, it is google's upcoming calendaring application, and it seems to rock, just as almost everything google releases. Its similarity with gmail is great, as well as the integration they will surely have.

Go and read yourself the details about it. There are some leaked screenshots too!

Less than a month ago I wrote about Opera integration with its own community site, so that it would be a great advantage for those of us members of the community. But I suspected nothing on how this idea can be scaled up to be related with the notion of an online operating system based on the browser and other "connected" applications. I was actually thinking small when I wrote that.

And this (rather outdated) post over here depicts a similar but scaled scenario, that would be great if Opera (the company) would dare to implement. The author talks about how he thinks an online (web-based) operating system might be, and I pretty much agree with him. Perhaps something like this is what Opera needs to become the real killer application that it should be. Opera is currently the best browser out there in terms of features, speed, accessibility, standards support, functionality, stability, security, etc. But it should be evident for most of us Opera supporters, that in the world of today, even all these is not enough. It doesn't generates the hype that could get this piece of software to the place it belongs to.

I have to admit though, that the most likely to develop something like this is Google and perhaps Yahoo. But Opera has to do something, because today is the aggregated value the one that matters the most, not the intrinsic real value. Take for instance the Google search engine. Google is not a search company anymore, they're more like an advertising company. The vision of "organizing the world's information" is just a facade. What does gtalk has to do with that? Now take Opera. The vision of being "the fastest browser on earth" is not enough. And the small (albeit loyal) user base that we are, will not maintain the company.

And going a little bit off topic now (but no so much). Today I've spent a little bit more time on the Internet than usual, perhaps because I've been out of it for most of the last two weeks, busy with the celebrations and all that. And I've been reading a lot of new things about the not-so-new concept of a web-based operating system. It seems that the arrival of the new year has awaken the dreams of many people claiming that, in spite of the exciting year that passed away, 2006 will be even more exiting in terms of web technologies, trends and all that. We are witnessing (live) the rebirth of a whole set of technologies with enormous social, cultural and political implications. The web is reshaping herself just in front of us.

Things like tagging, social software, folksonomy, standards, simple over complicated, small dedicated applications over one-app-fits-all-needs, feeds, communities, wisdom of the crowds, user-generated content, decentralization of web publishing, etc. All these and other stuff are becoming more and more an integral part of our daily experience and interaction with what started up being just a markup language.

Each day we spend more and more time on the web than doing anything else in our computers. We are increasingly preferring online applications than the traditional offline desktop-based ones. The most vivid examples are email clients, calendars and scheduling applications, newsfeeds aggregators, pictures and video managers, maps, and even online office suites and desktops. Some people have also talked about complete (or at least highly usable) web-based operating systems as a possibility in the future.

There are several reasons for all this. First, there are lots of free alternatives out there for many different kinds of applications. They are often more configurable and adaptable than their desktop counterparts (read theming, internationalization and localization, extendibility via plugins and open APIs). But perhaps the most important reason of all is the consistency and availability from a variety of differing systems and platforms. Some of these applications have also alternate but similar interfaces for mobile devices. This simple fact ensures that you see the same interface no matter where you are, if at work or at home, or if you are on someone else's computer, or in some Internet cafe while on your trip to Seychelles, or on that six-months stay on board the International Space Station orbiting the Earth.

But there is a single application that will hardly even have an online counterpart, not to mention a counterpart worth the switch. And that would be the web browser. The web browser is our permanent window to this immense zoo of blooming web desktops and applications. The web browser is the interface that doesn't travel with you as the rest of the set does. You could get to Seychelles and find out that they only have browsers X and Y, but they don't have Z, your browser of choice. Or you could find your self reinstalling a new box at home, and you have to go through all the process again. The process of fine-tuning your browser just the way you like it.

Opera already does a good job in this respect. Most of the configuration files inside the browser's profile folder are reusable. You can save them and restore them later on another computer, or give it away to other users. But I've had issues reusing Opera profile folders from Windows into a Linux user account, for example. It doesn't work out of the box. And even if it would, it will always imply an extra effort of backup and restore.

Imagine if Opera Community members could have their basic Opera customizations synchronized and stored online, as part of their user account in the community. This certainly doesn't solve all the problems of accessing the web from different places, but at least we could have a central configuration repository. And any changes you do to your interface (such as modifying your bookmarks or toolbars and menu layout), would be instantly available no matter where you start up Opera from.

Some other suggestions combined, such as developing a PortableOpera (as in PortableFirefox), could make this browser a real killer. Can you imagine your self with Opera installed in your USB flash memory stick (Linux, Windows and OSX could coexists), and authenticated against the Opera Community web site. The browser could also incorporate some of the community portal functionality, such as a built-in or plugin blog add-post interface and just about anything else you can imagine in terms of integration.

I was crawling the blogosphere for posts about Google Reader, the brand new Google RSS/ATOM aggregator, when I found this post, which inadvertently talks about something I mentioned more than two months ago.

This is the critical importance of the Internet OS concept, of which Web2.0 is a part. People go from place to place, and they like to have their tools and programs no matter where they are. They like to see their email the way they like it, without having to learn how to use different softwares. And that goes for email, feeds, social bookmarking, picture albums and sharing, and many other things.

It is funny. Sometime ago I read about history being like a spiral, where things periodically return to a state very much alike a previous time. Remember when computing started, and all you had was a terminal connected to a central mainframe? I think we're heading to some similar point. How about you?

This wasn't the intended next post for the Internet OS series, but after the recent events with some Google services, briefly commented on the previous post, I found an article which expresses my point of view, and relates all this to the Internet OS concept.

I've mentioned the ever growing presence of Google as some sort of Operating System within the Internet. It's all about two things: identity and integration. This article by Phil Windley, who blogs on Phil Windley's Technometria, portrays the situation very much as I see it.

It is one of the few pieces of texts that I've found making a realistic analysis of the implications of the new Google Talk service, mainly regarding its foundation over the Jabber IM environment. Who cares if the current first version of the program doesn't have lots of bells and whistles? Who cares about emoticons, webcam support? All of that will come, and perhaps some new stuff too. But that's not the issue.

And all this, as you can see in the article, tributes to a higher goal: to give meaning to a Google Identity (or GIDs, as Windley call them) and providing an integration between all Google Services through these identities. And what is an Operating System after all? As he said, ask Microsoft.