g.HO.ST ..... boo to the OS [its virtual]

In my previous post on why one should start using Firefox, I had mentioned the following, "... we hopefully will have some sorta virtual operating system in cyber space to which all we need to connect is JUST a browser (or s/w based on it)"

Well today I seem to have stumbled upon something headed well in the same direction. Enter Global Hosted Operating SysTem a.k.a. G.ho.st

G.ho.st Virtual Computer (VC) provides the first real alternative to Windows – a complete personal computing environment hosted on the Web and accessible from any browser.

An excerpt on things - from what they claim on their website,

1. Available from any browser in the world instead of being installed on one physical machine.
2. The operating system, many apps, and the first 3GB of data storage and 3GB of email storage are absolutely free.
3. Software (namely Web-based software) can be run without installation.
4. The computer is always up-to-date, secure and backed up with no action or cost on your part.
5. The G.ho.st VC manages all your Web logins and all your web 'stuff' (e.g. files on different web services).
6. Because it is online, the G.ho.st VC provides new possibilities for fun and collaboration, beyond what is available on a PC.

The applications you can currently run off your G.ho.st are

• Email & messengers
• Photo editing
• Scrapping text snippets, stickies,games, mp3, calculator, etc.
• Google docs (Edit word documents)
• Communication (Social networking and micro-blogging service utilizing instant messaging, SMS or a web interface.)
• Internet radio,
• etc.

But an application worth mentioning is the Office suite provided on G.ho.st by Z.O.H.O Well Google docs is there too, which is cool in its own rights, but Zoho offers - a cool wysiwyg editor, options to share docs, post docs to [blogs, face-book, etc.], auto-saving, spell checks, tag clouds & exports to popular formats. Apart from this, they offer a plugin which integrates into your MS-Office products to save direct to Z.o.h.o & vice versa to keep your docs/sheets in sync.

There are a host of other apps you may want to checkout at Z.O.H.O which is worth looking at. Ironically, there is a post on tech-republic touting z.o.h.o to be the next Microsoft (apart frm apple, cisco, etc). This article and associated blogged discussion is worth a read.(click here for it)