If you’re among the millions of people who belong to the curious-but-not-all-that-geeky crowd, the folks at MuseStorm have put together a fabulous AJAX Desktop Tutorial that will give you a hands-on, step-by-step demonstration of how to build an AJAX desktop or homepage in ten minutes or so.  I went there last night intending to spend about five minutes kicking the tires and wound up killing a couple of hours moving boxes around and happily turning feeds into merry little widgets.

In addition to the terrific tutorials, MuseStorm also has a collection of customizable forms that allow you to easily create widgets for RSS feeds, Google Search, News and Definition, Technorati, YouTube, Amazon Books, eBay Auctions,  Flickr photos and del.icio.us tags.  Create a feed, push a button, and MuseStorm generates code that you can drop into your blog or web page.  I would have liked to drop some in here to show you but, alas, the WordPress folks are a little paranoid about javascript they haven’t pre-approved.

Once you play with widgets for a few minutes, you begin to realize that this really could be the future of the  desktop.   What is likely to make the little devils ultimately appealing to enterprises is their simplicity of use and their ability to eliminate a lot of wasted and unnecessary tech fat from the way office work is currently performed.   

Imagine going into the office in the morning and instead of firing up the old PC with its cranky, mostly Microsoft office applications (so overloaded that you actually use perhaps 2% of their features), you flip on a networked thin client, which opens your personalized homepage with the lightweight  applications you use most often, i.e., a calendar, e-mail, and maybe a collaborative teamspace.  If you need something special–a spreadsheet, for example–you go to the widget closet and pull one out and drop it on your desktop.  As you work, your output is automatically saved and stored–not on your PC–but on a giant server farm in Montana or somewhere. 

This won’t happen overnight, of course.  Too many Western companies have too much money invested in huge operating systems designed to run needlessly complex applications.  As was the case with telecommunications industry’s shift from landlines to wireless, the countries and companies that will benefit first and most from thin computing will be those who have the least investment in existing infrastructure.  China, for example, managed to leapfrog directly from a 19th century economy into the digital age by leveraging Western advances in telecommunications and computing.  You can bet they (and many others) will do the same with the new lite computing paradigm.

If you want to experience Web 2.0 firsthand, give MuseStorm’s AJAX Desktop tutorial a test drive.  You’ll understand what all the excitement is about.