This is one killer web application, and something I’ve been specifically waiting for ever since I first tried out TiddlyWiki some months ago. It’s called ServerSideWiki — it’s a centralized version of TiddlyWiki.

TiddlyWiki is a remarkably useful “non-linear personal web notebook” that runs right in your web browser. It allows quick editing, linking, and formatting of text content (see the orignial Wiki), but it does it all in one seamless application, instead of the traditional “send information to the server and wait for a response” method.

Sound familiar? That what the promise of AJAX applications has been bringing to the web. Applications such as Google Maps and Ta-da Lists (to name just a couple) use this technology to make us forget we’re in a web browser.

But TiddlyWiki’s fatal flaw (at least the thing that kept me from really using it) is that it saves its data right on your computer. I realize that there are some advantages to this, like access to your information when you’re not online, but for someone like me who uses at least three different computers daily, what I really want is the easy synchronization that comes for free by storing data on a centralized server. And that’s what ServerSideWiki delivers.

There’s a disclaimer about ServerSideWiki being in development, but it works great for me so far in Firefox. Give it a look! (via Jake Tracey)

They’re taking a cue from Napster and RealNetworks and going with a subscription model. No word on exactly what type of DRM they’ll be using, but it does say that you’ll be able to listen to the music on your MP3 player, but the songs will stop working if you don’t renew your subscription every month. They’re also severely undercutting Napster to the tune of $7 vs. $15 per month.

In such a saturated market, one can only wonder how long it will take Google to jump in and do it better than all of them.