Google Get the Internet
Google are delivering on the promise of the modern internet, and it illustrates to everyone else what we are striving to achieve. Google Personalized Home gives you a personalized page full of widgets/gadgets/modules that you can drag and drop. These include RSS feeds, Gmail inbox summary and other mini web apps. You can easily write your own and plug them in. Gmail is a very good email provider, and is accessible via the web and over POP.
Mobile Web
You can use all these features on your mobile phone too. And this isn't like the false dawn of WAP - it really does work. The mobile version of Google personalized Home is easy to set up and use, as is Gmail, and they both work on basic XHTML browsers.
The Rest
Google Earth is amazing, and is a great example of a smart client, using their form of Ajax to give a seamless experience on your desktop whilst asynchronously using web services behind the scenes. Google Maps is a great example of a Rich Internet Application (RIA) making the user experience far more intuitive and effortless. In addition, the site that I'm using for this blog, Blogger is a very good example of an XHTML site.
This is Not an Advert
This may sound like an advert for Google, but I promise you it isn't. Its just that Google obviously get what opportunities the modern internet offers, and they are really delivering on that. Not many people seem to have this understanding, and I spend a lot of my time trying to explain why I'm so focussed on standards complient XHTML with CSS, and on a SOA. Its also why I don't want to fix the bug
in the website which is actually a bug in Internet Explorer's standards support. If you just try and build a site that works on all versions of Internet Explorer, you are missing the point. That was the 90's. Please, get with the program - see what you're missing out on.
