The Chrome web store is now live and, at least in my opinion it is very cool. I keep reading about how this is no more than glorified bookmarks, and why is this necessary. These questions are coming from a lot of the tech journalists I read and look up to, I would really expect them to be a little more forward thinking than they are.

Many of the apps I see in the Chrome Web Store are apps I have seen before, a bunch of them I have even tried out in the past. I even had bookmarks for some of them. To this extent right now many of them do appear to be bookmarks that just have a special home in the chrome browser start page but I think (hope) this is just the beginning. The Web Store is clearly part of the bigger Chrome OS picture. All of these apps are built using HTML 5 which has specifications for offline data storage and databases, this is where a little speculation comes in but it seems very legit. The fact that we have to “install” these apps from the store makes me think that this either is already or will in the future set up local temporary data storage for offline usage of these apps. Simplified this means that web apps will be available for use even while offline, making apps like google docs much more valuable for everyone.

Enough about the implications of the web store if you are using Google Chrome for your browser head over to chrome.google.com/webstore to have a look for yourself at all of the apps already available. Two that I would recommend right off the bat are the SI (Sports Illustrated) app and Springpad. These two apps really show what is possible with the HTML 5 spec. Each has a unique but very beautiful UI that challenges common ideas of what the web looks like.