Thursday, December 01, 2005


Hi All,
Yesterday, I came across a real world RIA... naah... not a girl... but a Rich Internet Application called goowy it was a featured site on my favourite
macromedia.com so I visited it .. and i was stunned by what I saw at goowy.com.

What They say :
goowy (re) is a rich experience service that offers you a new way of expressing yourself and interacting with your friends and family. We leverage the best web technologies to provide you with a fun, unique environment for managing your web mail, contacts, calendar, widgets, games and more.

What I would say...? Well...its a Web Based Desktop Solution, yes No Kidding... a Web based Desktop Solution (see below) its 100% Customizable as if its my Windows Desktop.... infact you can change your desktop theme too...



You can add necessary Widgets as per your requirements by using Manage Widgets Extension and for those, who loves to have the power of Windows Based Desktop, goowy comes as a Window based solution, a separate download is available for Windows and a Mac version is coming soon.


It gives you a 2 GB Mail Box, a RICH UI to explore, Calender, Contacts and Games :) I found its mailbox a real magic, notifiers, quick search and everything accessible at just one click.You can import your contacts from Outlook and alike mail clients.

Lets look at Mail Box first.
Its lil bit heavy for dial up users at first I suggest to use Lite version, and all those who are blessed with so-called Broad band, Goowy grooves... rocks... and wateverz..... its a 2 GB Mailbox with a nice Layout. Apart from traditional Mailbox features this one Comes packed with Audio-Visual notifiers for new mails, Manageable Folders, and a Fast Search Engine built into the mailbox itself.

Widgets allows you to customize your desktop by adding popular web services like Search Engines, Quotes, Stocks, News etc

Contacts Its a comprehensive contact manager, I would like to add I find it better than the one that comes with GMail. Its like the one that you see with Outlook. It has a useful feature : Import Contacts and for me it worked like a charm I added all of my GMail contacts to it by just clicking in the Wizard.

Games
Hiyaa... I wont say about Games here.... ;)

Calender Its well-structured and works fine, but I am not that good with scheduling my tasks so I didn't explore it much.

Goowy is not a Big Budget Adventure, it was started as a PoC, and now it has 25K registered users. Its a development effort, I request all of the developers out there or who ever reads this mail to register with goowy not just to maintain another mail box but to support the efforts.

Regards,
Chinmay