There seems to be a growing wave of these little net aware widget apps for the desktop recently, like Konfabulator, mac dashboard widgets, the google desktop stuff etc... They have always been around in the form of notepads, calculators, or image viewers, but they seem to be becoming a more formal 'space' now -- and more importantly people are actually starting to use them. The most interesting part is I think the surface is only being scratched with what can be done here, this could morph into something unrecognizable very quickly. There is the obvious weather, clocks and stocks, but with broadband internet, near infinite computing power, and hyper-personalization we are rapidly moving beyond just this. There is a killer app lurking here somewhere.

We've been internally prototyping Xamlon Web for GoogleDesktop, where developers use .NET to develop these very connected widgets, but still can use swf to deploy. These apps are really the perfect size for the flash platform - they can scale to be surprisingly big, but avoiding being the pig-on-a-spit sized apps like Word or Photoshop. Paul has a little demo of one running up on the Xamlon site, lots more to come here : ). Oh, swf scales so nicely too!

I really think these little targeted task specific apps have a big future - cut to the chase, no distractions and no bloat. Kind of like how Google won the search engine race with a textbox and logo, because everyone else was convinced you would rather buy dogfood at their cramped and confusing portals than actually do a search. Think outside the big ugly.

Maybe that is the idea with Google Talk - every review seems down on it for its lack of features, but maybe that is in fact the point. Haven't tired it yet actually so I can't say (no GMail address atm, help!), but I do hope it doesn't end up with portal-itis.