Meebo & other AJAX apps
There’s a new generation of interactive web applications written using a combination of technologies that together are called AJAX. One of the best I have seen is Meebo – a free online multi-network instant-messaging service which could be of real use to photographers working in different locations and needing to send instant-messages from other people’s computers.
Basically you just go to the webpage from any computer, enter your instant-messaging account details on either AOL IM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ or Jabber (or all of them), hit enter, and you are presented with a dynamic page giving you the ability to send/receive instant messages, complete with all your buddy lists. The interface is super and it is pretty much as good as most instant-messaging clients, only you can access it from any computer. From what they say, it is actually a web-frontend to the popular GAIM instant-messaging client.
They also have an SSL-encrypted version here
Services like this are the future of web applications and we are going to be seeing a lot more AJAX-based solutions soon. Wikipedia has a list of some other web services already utilising AJAX here
