Readers might recall my enthusiasm for browser toolbars: I’ve written several blog posts (click here, here and here) extolling their virtues and predicting that they’d cause a revolution in the way that people use the Internet.
All along, I’ve thought of toolbars as a convenient method of bringing websites to people’s desktops. Not even in my wildest dreams have I imagined that toolbars would one day be used to access applications located on people’s desktops.
Well, I’ve been proven wrong.
I recently came across a toolbar component called MS Office Shortcuts. You can add it to your browser and invoke your local desktop applications like Microsoft Office Word, Powerpoint, Outlook and Excel from your browser (You can download this component from here).
With MS Office Shortcuts, browsers are no longer restricted to their original purpose of accessing websites located in the cloud.
Talking about toolbars and desktops, I’ve to make a mention of AddThis – a simple, free widget that allows readers to conveniently bookmark and share the web page they’re reading on Digg, Del.icio.us, Facebook, MySpace, StumbleUpon, Google Bookmarks, and over 50 other popular bookmarking and social networking services with a single mouse-click. Readers can also email and print any web page using AddThis.
AddThis can be easily added to any website or blog and can be found at the bottom of every post in Talk of Many Things.