Accelerators coming to Windows 7

I expend most of the past week in NYC with the Internet Explorer team showcasing IE8 and aggiorno to most of the attendees of the Web 2.0 Expo; and got to say that some of the most acclaimed features from IE8 in the booth where both their new Accelerators and Webslices features.

Accelerators are services made accessible from within the users reach and can be activated by just selecting a piece of text in a page and getting results through a mashup of services without having to leave the page the user is in; while Webslices are pieces of Web pages that can be sliced and placed in the bookmarks toolbar for ease of reach and updated as per users request.

Accelerators such as the Define by Encarta and the Map with Live Earth, where among the ones that created the most wow effects from the hundreds of people that approach one of the 3 displays slated for demos, excelling the user experience of the user at hand.

Now to my surprise I found through the leaked photos of Windows 7 that were published yesterday, that such features seems like are also coming to the next generation of the Softies Desktop OS. Check the first menu item under Accessories in the the image below:

I can only imagine been able to mash up services right from within my Desktop experience, having the myriad of web services available at the reach of a right click and contextual to my task at hand.

I guess the view of an ubiquity experience between the desktop and the Web is becoming more and more a unifying paradigm, and with the advent of platforms such as Live Mesh powered by cloud services and the access to all of my services will enable an truly interconnected world of universal access.

Let's keep setting our expectations open, that Microsoft's PDC is just around the corner and you never know what could be that next big shift in the world of a semantic living.

Cheers and enjoy the future!