One day many decades from now when I am six zillion years old, all my great-great-great-grandchildren (or grandrobots, I shall not be prejudiced) will cluster around my knees and say, “Granny, tell us about the old days when you actually installed software on your computer.”

I find myself using online applications more and more — the lines are starting to get blurry. But places like Simple Spark ( http://simplespark.com/ ) really bring it home to you the variety of stuff that’s available online (or occasionally on-phone — there are some iPhone apps on here.)

The site is currently tracking over 5300 applications. You can browse these by most recent, by type (the aforementioned iPhone category, as well as Wii or more general mobile apps) or by category of application. You can also do a keyword search. At this writing applications on the front page include an experimental site to share meteorological data, a moon phase app for the iPhone, and an URL-shortener service. All over the map here.

I decided to do a keyword search for calendar. Simple Spark found 114 apps. (Yikes.) Besides the usual suspects like Google Calendar, there were a variety of results from services as general as RSSCalendar and Calendar to specific as Ovulation Calendar (should be self-explanatory) to an application that hooks Twitter and Google Calendar together, to FourthBook (Web-based church management system.)

Detail pages include an overview, several screenshots, and a link to visit the site. There’s also a place for reviews (though nothing I looked at actually had reviews) and a “related items” list. If you register, you can save apps to your own Simple Spark My Apps (but you do not have to register to search or browse the site.)

Web apps are getting to be like Web sites — it’s less and less possible to track what’s available. High time for a directory. Lots to see here but a huge timesink.

This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .