Maybe I’m just too old school, but I’m struggling to see why Prism (found via gHacks) would be all that useful. How is this better than well-maintained set of bookmarks, bookmarklets, or links on a custom start page? Or how about Firefox’s AwesomeBar? No matter how much spin you put on it, Prism appears to me to be just a stripped down web browser. If it’s going to look like a desktop app and act like a desktop app, I want the code and data to be local like a desktop app – like Adobe AIR or XULRunner. Maybe it would make more sense if it was combined with Gears or HTML5′s proposed offline storage, but still, haven’t Gmail’s recent and historical pattern of downtimes show some of the vulnerabilities of having web-only services? Web services are not created equal. If Twitter shows the fail whale for hours, how much is really lost, compared to Gmail being down?

Like I said, I’m old school. I like my email app to just do email and a calendar and not IM’s or web browsing, and vice versa all around.