(The picture at bottom is that of Goowy and the one on top is that of YouOS.)

I recently came to know about goowy.com and www.youos.com. They are online operating systems. Yes, online, web-based OS. This does not mean that you will not require a OS on your computer (yet). You will need atleast an OS, a browser and of course an Internet connection to access it. They are actually web-based application mimicking the user interface of an OS. They have wordprocessor, chatting software, games and more. This is a very novel approach. Now effectively you can take the whole desktop around the world without actually carrying it. So, now you can work on your documents anywhere around the internet and you are safe from any hardware or virus infecting your precious work. What’s more, you can even work on heavy application on your an era old computer.

I must mention that they are still in development stage. Goowy in beta and youos in alpha stage. Both of them have linux like graphical interface. Goowy has a good interface and also has a chat facility for Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, etc. users. YouOS on the other hand probaly allows only IRC chatting. YouOS though have a wordprocessor which I didn’t find in Goowy. Goowy is flash based where as YouOS is javascript based, hence in YouOS you can interact like a real OS and right click on the desktop to bring up a menu to chage wallpaper, whereas in Goowy we get the Flash player’s menu.

This is indeed a good concept. They need to evolve more to be made really usefull. Go to their sites and click on ‘Try a Demo’ to launch the OS right away.