When I first heard of Prism, I thought, “Why?” I already have Firefox. Just open a tab. But, with Prism, I can click once on a ’shortcut’, and the web application I want open is there. I can minimize it or close it. This is very useful if you want to open up Gmail or Google Reader and see in the taskbar how many new messages or feeds there are. The best feature in Prism is that you can choose not to display a menu, toolbar, etc. So, it appears as if you have another application open.

With more and more people moving over to web applications, Prism makes it easy to access them giving the look and feel of a desktop application. I can see Prism being used on tiny USB drives allowing you to access web applications anywhere.

Why should you use Prism for web applications instead of opening a new tab in a browser? When opening a lot of tabs in a browser, you can start to lose track of where that Gmail tab is or Google Reader, etc. If you’re going to leave them open 24/7, it might be better to store them on your taskbar so you can access them quickly (Alt + Tab), without having to click on a tab forcing you to leave the current tab you are looking at. This also makes it possible for you to close your browser while keeping those important web applications available.

One disadvantage that I can see when using Prism is that if you regularly use it for more than a few web applications/sites, it doesn’t remember what you last opened like most browsers do. You have to manually open each one.

Here is a list of web applications/sites you could use Prism with:

1. News Feed Aggregator (Google Reader, NewsGator, Bloglines, more.)
2. Calendar/Task Management (Google Calendar, Yahoo! Calendar, Remember The Milk, 30 Boxes)
3. Instant Messaging (Meebo, more.)
4. Office Apps (Google Docs, Google Notebook)
5. Stats (Google Analytics, Mint Stats, more.)
6. Banking (Mint, PayPal)
7. Social Networking (Pownce, Twitter, Jaiku, Last.fm, more.)
8. Gaming (Club Live Search, Monopoly Express, Pogo)
9. Blogging (WordPress, Blogger)
10. Video (Google Video, StumbleVideo, YouTube, more.)
11. E-mail (Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live Hotmail)
12. Planning (Room Planner)
13. Music (MeeMix, Last.fm) Need a MeeMix invite?

These are just some things you can use with Prism. Some sites may not work perfectly compared to using in a browser. One example would be that Meebo doesn’t look great in Prism, but it functions just fine.

If you save your password when logging into web applications with Prism, it makes accessing them much easier and faster. But, I don’t recommend saving your password for accessing bank accounts or other important information if you are not the only one with access to the computer.

If you use Prism for something not listed here, please share with everyone in the comments.