Last week, Mozilla announced a project called Prism, a newly packaged version of its Webrunner technology from a couple of years ago. Prism lets users split web applications out of their browser and run them directly on their desktop.

What’s interesting about this announcement is how many industry blogs and media covered it as a solution for offline apps, comparing it to other recently announced solutions like AIR and Silverlight. With all this clouding of messaging, I wanted to take a moment to clarify a few points about offline applications.

Prism does not current support offline, rather it’s a vehicle to access an existing website or web application from the desktop while a user is online. Hopefully Mozilla will choose to release an API for it in the future, making it more of a powerful option. It could theoretically be paired with a technology like Google Gears to create the impression of an offline app.

On a similar note, many posts recently have also lumped Silverlight in the offline apps category, comparing it to AIR. This too is a misconception. Silverlight is more akin to Flash Player than to anything else. Today, with version 1.0 of Silverlight, it cannot run offline. Yes, you can use Javascript in a browser to mimic some offline functions, but it is still isolated from the operating system. Now, Microsoft does note that support for offline functionality will come with version 1.1, but a release date for this has not yet been set.

I hope this helps to clarify a few of the recent misconceptions out there.

The difficult task of generating some meaningful and accurate numbers to justify your investments in rich content on your site has just gotten easier. Google Analytics, a popular website analysis tool amongst small to mid-sized businesses, has just been updated to now track user engagements that include elements common with Web 2.0 services, including Javascript, Ajax and Flash applications, widgets and gadgets, and downloadable pages.

This not only allows companies to better track their website numbers as a whole, it also allows them to offer advertisers alternate numbers to page views for gauging the success of an ad. New figures such as time spent on a page or the length of time an ad is visible may become more valuable to advertisers in the future.

Years ago working in marketing meant that you needed a strong sense of creativity, an ability to define a great communications strategy and the skills to build value for a brand. Today, you may need to add experience design to the mix. The latest trend for marketers is in creating “branded experiences”. While the concept is not new (it’s been discussed loosely since 2004), the reality is that these experiences are becoming more and more prevalent, mainly in the area of rich internet applications (RIAs). An article in last weekend’s New York Times explains how companies like Nike, General Motors, and Proctor and Gamble are pulling back on traditional ad spending and opting instead for creating deeper relationships with their clients through branded services and communities.

What does this mean for marketers? It means that they will now need to have a better sense of building applications and communities that truly engage users and integrate with their lives, getting them hooked and keeping them that way. Building an “experience” that is impressive and immersive enough to keep a user engaged over time takes a different skill-set than building a 30-second ad. It looks like marketers and software developers will be getting a little closer in the future.

There is a definite trend toward offering Software as a Service (SaaS). In recent weeks, we’ve seen Microsoft, Adobe, and even SAP make announcements or speak publicly about how SaaS is a fundamental part of their business strategies. Another more specialized announcement in this arena was the unveiling of eCommerce Framework by AIRApps.net.

AIRApps.net is offering Adobe AIR developers an alternative way to license and sell their applications. By providing an injectable plug-in that developers can add to their applications during development, AIRApps.net is providing developers a hassle-free way to process transactions and collect licensing revenue without having to set-up their own payment processing arrangements - which can be time consuming and costly.

MapQuest was the first meaningful online application that I ever saw. I remember very clearly my ah-ha! moment. It was in 1996.

I found MapQuest meaningful because it was rich. As rich as it could get then. It provided information that one could fathom in a glance, in a time where most websites insisted on providing long scrolling texts vastly inspired by the computer terminal mentality.

In the years to follow, MapQuest enjoyed the undisputed status of being "the mapping standard" on the Internet, despite vigorous attacks from Microsoft, Yahoo! and many others.

Then, in 2005, Google Maps came along and started eating serious market share from MapQuest. Although MapQuest still has more traffic than Google Maps today, its user base has been eroding steadily whereas Google Maps' is in high-speed growth. Now, less than three years after going online, Google Maps gets about 2/3 of MapQuest's traffic.

The reason for this, according to Forrester Research is that Google Maps offers an interface that treats users with a little respect.

Forrester's research also found that, because Google Maps offered a superior user experience, customers' perceptions were that Google Maps was more accurate than MapQuest and Yahoo! But this was only a perception: All three online mapping sites got their data from the same source.

A similar (though bolder) observation is made by Jason Fried from 37 Signals (developers of Basecamp, Bakpack and Ruby on Rails) in Google Maps proves "It's the experience, stupid".

Last Friday, MapQuest finally revealed its secret weapon to keep its leadership position: A new application rebuilt from the ground up to deliver better user interfaces.

The lesson (re)learned here is that the IT industry is the fastest one ever experienced in the history of the world, and the one that produces more disruptive innovations than humans are accustomed to. Market leadership can very quickly topple as we've all witnessed with WordPerfect vs MS Word, Lotus 1-2-3 vs MS Excel, Palm vs Blackberry, MySpace vs Facebook and numerous other cases.

In order to survive the last 30 years, software publishers had to foresee the PC revolution and move away from developing on mini-computers. They had to foresee that MS-DOS was the winning alternative, not CP/M or Apple DOS. They had to move from MS-DOS to Windows in due time, support cross-platform file compatiblity, TCP/IP (not Novell Netware, which was to market leader), and embrace client/server architecture and the Internet wave, just to name a few.

Where do the threats and opportunities of the future lie? There are strong indications about Rich Internet Applications, social networks and user generated content, Software as a Service, Mobile devices with larger displays and geolocation, and more.

Mapquest's next bet is on a Rich Internet Application.

What will yours be?

In RIA-zation of Office Tools, I suggested that we (the people) were ready for a new breed of online Office tools based on RIA principles:

• Instant engagement: no setup required, get started right away
• Rich and expressive interfaces: get productive quickly and stay focused on your work, not the tool
• Access files from anywhere regardless of equipment, operating system or context
• Peace of mind for all things related to backups, viruses or security

There are a few contenders in the market including Google Docs, Zoho Writer, Writeboard, Thinkfree and many others. Microsoft recently announced an online extension to MS Word, but it does not qualify as an RIA because it nonetheless requires the installation of MS Word on the client side.

The buzz last week was Adobe's entry in the online word processor market with Buzzword.

If you are wondering how much one can innovate with a glorified online typewriter, you should take a look at Buzzword. It features a tidy user interface, provides advanced functionality through progressive disclosure (e.g. tables, images, comments are not in-your-face as you open the application but can be revealed in the same workspace and context) and delivers a simple way to get to a gratifying level of productivity fast.

Obviously, with so much emphasis on simplicity, Buzzword is not as powerful a word processor as many seasoned users would have expected. But this whole debate makes me relive the MS-DOS vs Mac crossfire I got stuck in 20 years ago. MS-DOS was the powerful and highly configurable environment that you must have worked hard to tame, whereas Mac was the completely sanitated and sealed environment that empowered the lazier audiences. Ultimately, this fueled religious debates (and witty essays such as Umberto Eco's) with no clear conclusion: both approaches were very valid and appropriate to their respective audiences.

With the introduction of Buzzword, Adobe demonstrated that it was thinking different and that we are not through with heated debates about which approach to favor.

After returning home from Adobe MAX and taking a day to digest the barrage of information presented at the show, it’s time to sit back and really extract the key points.

In my opinion, the most important element of the show was how prevalent RIAs have become. Nearly every session at the show touched on building rich user experiences. The new twist this year was around AIR and showcasing applications that work seamlessly online and offline. This again is further proof of the pendulum swinging back to the desktop.

Another key trend at the show was mobile. It’s clear from the number of examples and the content that was presented that mobile has hit the radar as the next big thing and is something that will grow and evolve in the coming months.

Adobe also joined industry leaders like Amazon, Microsoft, and Yahoo in announcing its new realm of services. These offerings, although some are very early in the development cycle, are shaping up to be much more interactive, software as a service (SaaS) than some of the competition.

Finally, Adobe previewed some interesting tools to help developers and designers alike embrace these new trends. The scope of which spanned from Director 11 through to Thermo.

We’ve written lately about the "swing back to the desktop" and this trend was quite evident with the kick-off of the Adobe MAX conference here in Chicago. About one-third of the opening keynote was dedicated to the new AIR offering, with a number of strong examples from key industry players. Amongst the AIR demos, were some polished offerings from AOL (an application that allows you to access the top 100 music videos from your desktop), Disney Theme Parks (an application that allows travel agents to build custom info packs for their clients), and SAP (an application that provides an offline "briefing book" a type of "dashboard" for key business metrics). Even MTV is getting in the game by hosting the "MTV Adobe® AIR™ Challenge".

With these heavy hitters jumping on-board, things look promising for AIR.