Occasionally I stumble across one or two things on the web that are really clever, either because they work really well or just show off some fancy AJAX JS technologies…

The most visually appealing (and arguably most pointless) has to be TheBroth, which provides a shared canvas and 100s of movable pixels that everyone who is on the page at the same time can contribute to in real time. If you want to do something a little more useful with pictures you might like to look at pixoh which provides basic image editing (rotate, crop, contrast, brightness etc) in an entirely web-based environment. If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to share your photos online (particularly if you use iPhoto) be sure to check out bubbleshare.
For a bit more pointless fun there’s always sinkmyship.com - an AJAX version of the classic game Battleships where you can play against other people and chat to them in realtime.

The most recent site that appeals to my “show off technology for the sake of it and achieve something really clever” is eventsites which allows you to create a page for your event with information, a map and photos and stores absolutely NOTHING on the web server that hosts it (the entire thing really is just one page and no database!)

And of course no pile of links about web apps would be complete without mentioning the one and only Meebo which I use daily at the moment to keep in touch with people since I don’t have my PowerBook…

All these (and more) continue to inspire me to do something similar, to write some groundbreaking web app.. but two things stop me… one, I don’t know enough AJAX stuff and two, I keep seeming to come up with ideas that other people have thought of!