From the same nice people who brought us that dishwasher churning away in the next room comes an exiting new way to visually brainstorm and collaborate with your friends! Ok, so it might not be all that "new," and some of you might not find it particularly "exciting," but dammit, I thought it was cool. Developed by General Electric, Imagination Cubed (hence-force to be known as I^3, for the self-serving purpose of me not having to type it out each time) is another one of them multi-user online whiteboards. As I said, nothing particularly special about that. The cool thing about I^3 that sets it apart from other similar tools is the fact that there are no accounts, and therefore, you never have to go out of your way to make sure your friends and co-workers are registered. Simply visit the site and invite up to 2 other people to simultaneously use your white board. When you're done, you can print your final product, see a replay of what happened, or save the white board for later. I can see this being really useful for those times when you are trying to explain to their mother-in-law how to use tivo to record "Today in Cats," and that she needs to "push the green button, not that one, the other one, I mean the big green button shaped like a rhinoceros, here let me draw it for you!" You can also add text to your drawing, change the background color, and display a grid to help you draw more geometrically.

Wrap all this up in a delicious nougat AJAX interface and you've got yourself a winning web 2.0 application. Now, if only they could find a way to monetize it...

Via Lifehacker

How long will they be able to keep this up?  AjaxLaunch.com has been putting out a new service each week, though this week's is bumped back to tomorrow.  It's a web based spreadsheet program.  Some people have complained that if the work is going to be done on the network, then the end result should be a file that can be saved on the network.  That makes sense to me, but I'm still impressed.   The question does not appear to be on their just posted Top 10 questions we're asked about AjaxWrite.

I'll be interested to see what they come up with 3 weeks from now.  Audio editing seems a logical follow up from last week's video editing.  Image editing ala  pxn8?  A nice Ajax enabled web calendar could be good.  I'm sure there's some more creative possibilities out there, though.  Any ideas?

Michael Robertson, chairman of Linux desktop company Linspire and co instigator of GizmoProject, has begun an incredible new experiment called AJAXlaunch.  He and his co conspirators are launching a new AJAX fueled web service every week.  His first two launches have been:

• AjaxWrite, a very smooth web based word processor that opens and saves documents in Microsoft .doc format.  I really like it.  As one observer has noted, it's a shame that Open Document Format isn't supported, but maybe someday it will be.  Six days after launch, more that a half million documents have been created using the system.
• Now there's AjaxSketch, a drawing program.

What's next?  We'll find out this Wednesday.  Robertson says this project is intended, basically, to help bridge the digital divide.  Free software, instantly available.  Sounds like a very cool use of AJAX and the software as a service paradigm.

So I've lamented before about the egregiously overflowing mess that is my browser toolbar, as a result of all of the irresistable web services and their bookmarklets. Blummy addresses that problem quite admirably by collapsing a number of bookmarklets into one bookmarklet (or blummlets, as it were) to rule them all. You can configure your blummlet with a number of preset options, or create your own. It allows you to do very sweet time-saving little tricks like post a page to del.icio.us and then send it via Gmail from one contained interface that expands when you click the Blummy bookmarklet. It's a bookmarklet aggregator. It's the Flickr of bookmarklets, yo.

[Via Emily Chang]