The Scoble, musing about Pandora, writes

I really hate this “everything has to be a Web app” trend that we’re in the middle of. This service is totally crying out for a rich-client application.

Which I would agree with, except it turns out I don’t.

Some time ago when Google Earth first came out, I downloaded it and was entirely impressed. Really quite a nice app. Visually beautiful, well implemented, good stuff all around.

Browsing the blogs, I ran across a posting that told of the Google guy who ran the Google Earth effort actually apologizing that it was not a Web app. Huh, I thought, with such a beautiful app, you don’t have to apologize. It’s so very nice.

Since then I’ve played with Google Earth exactly once, when I was trying to figure out the topology of Yosemite. On the other hand, I use maps almost on a daily basis. Mainly Yahoo maps, because while not as beautiful as Google maps, it’s a bit more usable. Remembers my addresses and such.

So, to my surprise, it turns out my behavior suggests every app actually does need to be a Web app. While I find Earth a lovely application, the overhead of starting up an app, waiting for it to come up, getting what I need, and then shutting it off again is just too much. Put another way, if I can just open a new tab in the browser and get what I need in less time than it takes to start a standalone app, I’m very unlikely to use the standalone even if it’s nicer. The web app needs to be just good enough and I can forego the standalone app.

Which is surprising really. Even more reason to make this AJAX thing more commonplace.

Btw, somebody send me a Pandora invite so I can try this thing out. Please.