The Office 2.0 Podcast Jam is alive and kicking

I have my own views on Office2.0. I can't see it taking off much until persistent storage is supported locally by all browsers and offline access and document synchronisation is done well. We'll see more Single Page Application's written entirely in Javascript utilising features like Firefox 2's persistent storage as it evolves to perform this task. Possibly in the form of bookmarklets that will allow applications to be run in browser while offline that store to persistent storage - synchronising online during reconnect. Mass usage will come down to when IE supports persistent storage other than this.

Synchronisation to people's favorite storage provider will become increasingly important too. As will APIs in the area that afford interoperability allowing Web Application developers to support one standard to allow many places of storage for users. Even multiple places(e.g. backup) for each piece of data. I can't help but think about Personal Identity Providers here.
I'm actually running RC2 of Firefox 2 at the moment and I have to say it's an improvement over beta 2. Seems quite slick and I finally learnt how to remove those silly close tab buttons. I still can't re-size my search box but in this version it's smaller and easier to manage for my preferred tool bar layout. I'm loving the spell check as I type though! Another Office2.0 feature goes mainstream. I can see this improving language skills exponentially. Unfortunately I chose to install the US version! Not British or Australian.

While I'm on Firefox. I'm still getting used to the scroll tabbing. I don't think I like that. I can't see all my tabs at a glance. Will figure out how to turn that one off as I tend to navigate by favicon when I have a lot of tabs open. Fading non-active tabs sucks as well… I wonder how long it is before I hack the theme.
Looking ahead, I see things really getting interesting when my browser begins to become my document manager. Tabbed browsing will become increasingly more important. One feature I'd like for tabs is the ability to open an existing tab in a new browser window instance. At the moment I have to open a new window and then drag the tab to it, refreshing the tab in the process. That sucks when I've downloaded a movie or screencast in it. Basically I want threaded tabs. A separate memory space so as to prevent one in-browser application crashing the lot as happens a lot now… Tab locking too. Preventing accidental closure. One reason why I HATE close buttons on all tabs!

I've been thinking about data distribution and the open API model services like Amazon S3 offer. The more I think about it, the more I see a need for an identity system with integrated online data storage. I call this an i-drive API spec. Something any hosting provider could implement.
Here's how I see it work; first a standard form of data storage API be developed with all the bells and whistles for users to secure their data and access though a standard protocol. Possibly different levels of API security spec too. Not everyone wants to store secure data and not every provider has the resources to implement high security. I'd like the option to be able to store my photo's/music/data on my own server for example. Other sensitive data on secure services. Anyway, users are then given the option of where they choose to store that data when using identity broker services. The Yadis identity service discovery system then shares that i-drive information with i-drive enabled apps. The apps can cache if the API lets it. (much like I believe XDI link contracts work). This way, anyone can store specific data anywhere that provides an i-drive service, even multiple services for the same data, eg. backup and redundancy. Some people might want that data all in one place. Me, I like diversity and choice.

As I understand it XDI will do some(all?) of this for i-names. A full blown i-broker implementation I'm guessing? More to read…

Ideally I'd like to be able to grab some open source i-drive code, dump it on my on own web host, tell my Yadis supported identity account where my i-drive is located and what it's to be used for and all the rest between my web apps and i-drive is taken care of for me. Additionally I could then implement my own open source OpenID(or i-names) broker with i-drive on my server then and start using it and encouraging sites like flickr to support it. It could all be built into my blogware. That'd be sweet. I could even have an i-drive service running on my operating system keeping sync (if my bandwidth costs weren't so high).

Using this service I could subscribe to all sorts of data that gets added to my i-drive and sync'd to specific i-drive devices (TV/Music Player). YouTube on my real tube.

Anyone know of efforts around other than XDI looking to do something like this?

Update: Another thought. Triggered while reading Mark Cuban. Make each and everyone of these i-drives BitTorrent capable.

Update: A bare bones API extendable to include data manipulation extensions for web apps to make use of. eg. attach advert clip to a podcast, resize an image, seek to a video or comment location inside media, etc. WebDAV?

Update: I found this great post by Christine when looking for another of hers I'd read previously. It covers the need for decentralized data access. Well worth a good read.