Free remote media service Webot (www.webot.com) recently released agents for Linux and MacOS, adding to existing Windows support.

This may not seem like such a big deal. But it’s a sign of a tectonic shift going on right now: From the closed, local desktop to the always-on, I-want-it-now world we’re going to live in soon.

I’ve been on the road for the past couple of weeks. And I’ve seen a lot of change.

• At Web2Summit, I saw Nokia’s launch of the N810 (about which I’ll be writing over at GigaOm shortly.) The N810 invites comparisons with Apple’s iPhone, but it’s a different beast. It’s an open, Linux-based platform that runs Flash and pretty much anything else.
• Then, a week later at Interop, everyone was talking virtualization and on-demand services. Nobody cared which machine their app was on, or where it was located. Turning up a server was a few keystrokes.
• Now Google’s announcing an open, federated alternative to Facebook’s Social Graph APIs. The war for the online operating system is playing out, with each mega-site offering its own platform for software development.

Platform independence is huge

Webot’s release means my media — pictures, music, and so on — is made whole, freed from the tyranny of multiple machines and myriad operating systems.

Okay, that part sounds a bit melodramatic. But the point here is that we’ve moved beyond locked-up devices with open services.

In fact, you can play Webot on an iPhone through Safari; Webot doesn’t care that you can’t install things on your iPhone. Right now, I’m sitting at home, listening to an obscure Orb remix from my machine at work, just as easily as I’d use a local player.

But I don’t use my local player any more: I just bookmark my remote player.

I don’t care where my music is.

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Been writing elsewhere a bit lately, while out at Web2Summit in San Francisco.

• One blog on Green Code, looking at whether lousy code and heavy architectures cost more (and are worse for the planet) over at Earth2Tech.
• One on Facebook and other Big Internet sites as the operating systems of the web — and what that means for application developers — at GigaOm.

Off to New York for Interop and some interesting research on data centers now.