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With Google Chrome OS Your Web Applications Will Be The New Desktop Applications

The other day I had the privilege of writing code almost nonstop (with a couple small food breaks) for about 12 hours. During this long sprint I left Pandora open the entire day on one of my side monitors. I noticed something interesting after my 12 hours (I am a PandoraOne client) of continuously using Pandora... I provided just one single pageview to the site after spending half of a day on it.

Pandora of course has already seen this coming and is optimized for it. The ad impressions on their free version are displayed based on time on the site and not page view.

More products also act like this including Gmail and Google Reader. Even the product I am currently working on (BuzzStat.com) is feeling more and more like an desktop application and less like a web site as we develop it further.

This is becoming more common in this new land of the AJAX built web but I believe in the next 3 years we will see an explosion of web apps that feel more like desktop apps. Right now the web is already moving in that direction but we will soon see this accelerate if Google has it's way.

Why is this?

The launch of the Google Chrome OS may be the single largest push to make your desktop and the web become one. With that change there will be no more concept of "desktop applications". The web applications under development today will now be the new desktop applications of tomorrow.

What you need to do is be prepared when this change happens. The web application your developing today needs to start looking and feeling more like a desktop application. This is the way it will be treated and this is what users will soon come to expect.

This is the direction the web will soon go so it's better to be ahead of the curve.