Social Media Applications in Mozilla Prism

I’ve been using Mozilla Prism on Dan‘s recommendation for a few months now. Essentially it allows you to  run web applications as if they were desktop applications. It shows first hand that many of the specialized applications that reside on the web don’t really require browsers to facilitate all their functions.

With Prism:

• You can make direct shortcuts to websites on your desktop, dock, start menu, quick launch, etc.

• The sites are viewed in their own windows that can minimize to your notification area.

• Navigation keys, tool and button bars and menus can be enabled or disabled, depending what functions you need. For example, navigations keys are useful in Twitter so you can refresh with F5, but less useful in Google Calendar and other applications where pressing the “back” button can confuse the system.

• You can move and size the apps any way you want without affecting the look of other pages you’re browsing. For example, I shrank Facebook to hide the right panel after it started telling me to poke my friends! I can just slide the scrollbar over to see new invitations.  I also did this with Twitter, which has a more useful right-side panel, but is still not something I need all the time. This is a simple but very useful feature for me.

Incidentally, Zimbra, one of the aggregators we’ve looked at in LIBR559M, uses Prism to deliver web content. A good example of how open source software allows us to build robust applications.

So far I’m running Google Reader, Gmail, Google Calendar, Facebook and Twitter through Prism and they all work very well. I especially like the way links in the various Prism windows all open as new tabs in a single (and fully funtional) Firefox window. Aggregators like Netvibes and Pageflakes also work in Prism, which could become especially useful for those who use those aggregators extensively.

It’s interesting that while aggregators make social media apps simple by combining different platforms and adding more functionality, Prism is able to make social media apps simple by keeping them separate and giving users a more minimalistic experience. I think both of these approaches have their benefits!

If you’re interested in using Prism you can download the extension for Firefox (which gives you an easy menu option to create apps), or the standalone version of the program at http://prism.mozilla.com/

And Thanks Dan for teaching me about this great application!