Flutterby™! : online maps & web apps

Much brouhaha has been made over Google Maps, including JJG's breathless proclamation that the platform he calls "Ajax" is the wave of the future (I'm being a little unfair to Jesse, so cut him some slack on that). Well, now that Google Maps supports Opera, I decided to try it out for some trip planning for a visit to the Sierra we're doing this weekend. While the "wow, the bear dances" factor of the dragging and scrolling and the dynamic tile updating was, indeed, cool, after a short time I was back at maps.yahoo.com because when the page loaded, I knew I was looking at the right thing. The more I see web apps come into their own, the more I think that Microsoft is looking in the right direction with notYET, even though I desperately hope that that abomination isn't the one that eventually rules. I'd really rather see some combination of Python and Gtk become the standard for such things, or maybe that companies find ways to provide the services component of these things in a way that application authors can use them and the appropriate money can gety spread around.