Joyent Slingshot is another competitor fighting Adobe Apollo on the on/offline webapp-market. Slingshot promises to deploy Ruby-on-Rails apps & data synchronisation to Windows & Mac-desktops by april 2007. considering Rails’ popularity among web2.0-folks, this might be worth checking out (although it’s not really clear under which kind of license Singshot will operate).
Highrise, 37signals’ eagerly anticipated CRM-tool, has been released today. looks like another great app - especially - for virtual companies. just take the tour to see a why 37signals is where they’re today - doesn’t this just make you wanna sign-up?
an alpha-version of Adobe Apollo (you know, the framework enabling flash-apps for the offline-world) has been released on sunday. Arrington - who’s been praising Apollo since day 0 - is calling developers to arms start coding. he’s either right in that Apollo is a game-changer, or he’s got a nice promotion-gig 
seriously, I think Apollo might indeed bring a new generation of hybrid apps (though I’ld obviously prefer open approaches, but honestly, it looks like Adobe’s got a pretty decent headstart).
Twitter-hype & associated gets maddening. Dashboard-widgets, local apps for mac and windows, flash-widgets. guess that’s what you get when offering a dead-easy API 
…the downside: their servers tend to be ridiculously slow, or they go down (for maintenance) at all. meanwhile, Twitterholic unveils A-list twitters - there are currently only 5 people/accounts attracting more than 1.000 follower. I subscribed to #5, Darthvader.
ps: if only my Google Reader had a ’search’-box (the greasemonkey-scripts available somehow didn’t work for me)
pps: a linkup between Google Reader & Google Calendar would be nice too - I just had to copy&paste this Subotron lecture on (video)game journalism…that’s so web 1.0
sooner than expected, Linden Labs yesterday announced integration of voice-messaging into Second Life for Q2/2007, with a beta-run starting as early as next week. while residents have been using Skype and other popular teamspeak-applications since ages, the native SL-feature will go further by offering 3D-enabled, spatial audio. if done properly, this will increase the VR-experience massively.
on-/offline application development-platform Apollo gets presented to the web industry at Adobe Engage. lots of coverage… Read/WriteWeb has a good summary of what could be one if this years hottest products.
Search Engine Land congratulates Flickr on its upcoming 3rd birthday. the photo-sharing community which is now owned by Yahoo! pioneered the frontiers of Web 2.0 in many ways, mainly by bringing tagging and other Ajax-UI paradigms to the mainstream. happy birthday!
according to Read/WriteWeb, Firefox 3 will offer support for running web-applications offline. though it’s not yet clear on which level this might happen, this is major news for providers of service-based web-software. the biggest advantage of online-apps - using them on any device with net-access with no need to sync data - is at the same time their worst caveat - when connectivity goes down, so do online-apps and all data stored within them (that’s why it is a good idea even for fulltime Gmail-users to backup their mail via POP3).
of course, Firefox isn’t alone in trying to move web-apps offline - Adobe’s Apollo framework promotes offline-services on top of their successful Flash-platform. Flash has bee used to store data in a local cache for quite a time, as it has been the only cross-browser solution besides storing (mini-chunks of) data within cookies (Niall Kennedy gives a good overview on various methods of storing data locally). applications like Scrybe (private beta) let us anticipate the way future online/offline-apps might look&feel.
besides Adobe, several open source projects are working on solutions for the offline-dilemma: the Dojo Offline Project and POW (Plain Old Webserver) both implement a proxy http-server for running local copies of web-applications. while Dojo Offline isn’t available yet, POW - a firefox plugin (which means basically a web-server implemented in Javascript!) - is ready for download.
naturally, existing web-apps require heavy modification to work with any of the mentioned offline-approaches, meaning we still have to wait for real-life apps leveraging the benefits of going offline.
