Your data from the desktop to the web
With the advent of Web 2.0, applications that traditionally lived on your desktop, are now popping up on the web. Behind the push is none other than Google. Yesterday, they made a limited release of their online Spreadsheets application — essentially, Microsoft Excel for your browser. While impressive as far as what one normally finds on the web, it's still not as good as the real thing — at least, not as far as basically usability features such as resizing cell widths. What is impressive is what they've added: collaboration.You can share your spreadsheet with other users, giving them either read-only or write access. Changes are made in real-time, so if I update a cell value, any of my participants see the change right away. Also of note is the integration of Google's chat utility so that participants can chat with each other as they crunch numbers together. (This takes business geekiness to a whole new level.)
But Google is not the only company making strides in taking your data online. A local Vancouver company, Smallthought Systems Inc., have created a very impressive product called Dabble DB. While Google Spreadsheets lets you input your data, Dabble DB takes things to a whole new level that I've never seen from any desktop application. Dabble intelligently organizes and relates your data, among many other things. I encourage you to check out their demo video as I'm underselling how cool it actually is. I find it inspiring that a small Vancouver company can give birth to a product carrying a much higher wow factor than a company as large and with as many resources as Google. (And I tip my hat to Luke Andrews who brought such a nice, friendly feel to an otherwise data-oriented application.)
The real test, however, will be to see how comfortable people are putting their data online. Given how most people have no problem putting their most intimate communications online (ie. email), you'd think they'd also trust that their business data would be safe too. Only time will tell...
Update: Dabble DB founders respond to Google Spreadsheets.
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