If you take the internet out of context and forget about all the obvious productivity advantages it has given us, like email, skype and so on, it’s still not anywhere near to being as much of a time saver in productivity as it could be. Let me explain.

Take a look at the average internet user for example. He loads up gmail, sends and email, browses for an attachment, sends it. Then he logs in to his blog, writes an article, fires up GIMP and makes an image for the post. He simultaneously logs on to Twitter, to let the world know he’s writing a blog post, and so on and so forth. Much of our time is wasted on switching between apps, and overall, using too many application to accomplish our goals.

Services and technologies spreading like wildfire on the net are constantly changing this, and making us more productive. For once I’m not talking about Remember the Milk, or even Gmail, but the applications that serve to bring these all together.

Prism, Adobe Air, Google Desktop and a whole host of other applications are working together to serve us a dish which we can eat all at once, not bit by bit. Using Adobe Air you can use the much quicker interface of your desktop to control applications like Twitter, Chat clients, and almost any other web service. Using Prism you can integrate services into your desktop better, and Google desktop search brings together various web services with the power of Google Search on the web and on your desktop.

In my opinion this is all just the beginning. Prism in reality doesn’t give us a huge productivity boost, it’s just more convenient and browser independent. Adobe air is a better example, since this way we can customize better to our tastes and use our desktops speedier environment. The future lies in these technologies though, imagine an Adobe Air like software for bloggers, joining Wordpress, Splashup, Flickr, Twitter and News sites. It would be an online suite of the tools I use for blogging saving content online and on my hard drive as well. It could automatically create databases for me with post contents, titles, categories, pics used and so on. It could also automatically post to Twitter, notify me of comments and so on.

As you can see there is a great deal more that can be done, but I think what I described above is technologically very possible. What remains perhaps is an easy way to connect all these services, so users with minimal amount of programming knowledge can custom-tie apps together, to serve their own productivity.