Some big news in the RIA world: Oddpost has been acquired by Yahoo. Oddpost offers an Outlook-like mail application, delivered over the Web into Internet Explorer. This is about more than Web-based email; while Yahoo was likely motivated by a need to compete with Google's Gmail, the net effect will be that millions of users on Web at large get exposed to the fact that "real" applications can indeed be delivered into a Web browser.
There's some great analysis at Loosely Coupled on this, including how this and RIAs in general relate to Microsoft's Longhorn strategy. Also worth checking out are Marc Canter, who sees Yahoo taking a leadership position on user experience, as well as Dave Winer, who makes the point that "Google has competition on elegance of user interface." This is just great news for the RIA space.
I'm really happy for the folks at Oddpost. Laszlo and Oddpost both got started in late 2000, during the downturn; we both showed at Demo 2003 and in fact had adjacent booths there. They paid their dues working "next to a Chinatown restaurant that emits mysterious odors" (see this article at Wired for more); and as it happens our first office, was above a Filipino restaurant (on Mission St. in San Francisco, between 5th St. and 6th St. -- if you know what that means) which also emitted rather mysterious odors. See, RIA solidarity in action.
If you haven't seen it, by the way, I suggest checking out Oddblog, the Oddpost blog, which features a truly entertaining writing style and hopefully won't be going away. Who writes this, anyway? Good stuff.