So, staying on the topic of image editors, for those of you who can access the internet and don’t have enough money for a good photo editor, there’s Pixlr.

Pixlr is a great online photo editor.  I use it every once in a while (mainly if I’m frusterated with what’s on my computer or am on someone else’s computer).  There’s also Picnik, but I feel that Pixlr provides a better interface and gives me a more at home feeling.  It doesn’t have all the effects in the world, but for an online app, I think it’s pretty decent.

But it makes me wonder, with so many free online applications appearing that intend to offer an online version of what we traditionally install on our hard drives, what does the future of the internet hold for us?  There online office suites, online image editors, and it’s growing day-by-day.

I think in the future, you’re going to have to pay a subscription to some place and you’re computer won’t really have a hard drive.  You boot up, and it loads up your operating system from someplace online.  All your data would be stored in a centralized place online, and you’d be able to access it from anywhere.  I think that’s where we’re headed.  The internet is so fast, online storage is becoming cheaper, and applications are even filling the needs of what many people desire.  Apple already has mobileMe, Microsoft has Skybox and whatnot, so where are we headed?  Many people aleady pay ~$15 a month for site hosting, so let’s look at it this way.  Let’s say an operating system costs you $200, and a new version is released every 2 years.  The people already paying for hosting spend $180 a year.  So if people built a very good online OS, and charged a monthly subscription fee of about $25 a month (this would provide a personal homepage and the user’s OS account), then that’d be $300 a year per person  ($600 every 2 years, 3 times more than what a standard OS would cost them).  I don’t think it’d pay for itself at first, but if it was a good project and people started using it regularly, then it might wind up being a good investment.  But you’d have to look at server costs and whatnot too…

That’s a project idea for the future, now I need to learn flash and other cool things.  I’m not sure if AJAX+PHP+ImageMagick would be enough…  So who’s with me!…  I can here the silence.