Lei’s official Weblog

When I was reading ‘The World is Flat’, I particularly took a mental note of ‘web-based applications’ the author mentioned in the book. Of course, online tools and web-delivered services are nothing new, Hotmail, YahooMail and online games are all examples of it. But these are nothing campared to the complicated software delivered through the web today.

Here is an interesting example of it. You can try it out on Snipshot website. Of course, this one is not very sophisticated, but you get the idea! (if you want to try it out with the above Chinese garden image, then simply paste the image URL http://leiwu.net/Garden1.jpg in the box says Open from URL on Snipshot site.)

I have no idea about the technology behind this sort of web applications. But I know the impact of this development will be significant. It could be possible that in the future the way we access technology and information becomes more like the way we use tap water and electricity today. It will completely eliminite the hassle for having to frequently upgrading software on our PCs as the service providers will take care all of these on their side. Even more drastically, we may abandon our PCs or at least mainframes all together since everything including storage are going to be provided for us through the web.

Another link for web-delivered business tools.