Okay there are thousands of rich internet applications (RIAs) out there that I could write about but I'm trying to be very selective in order to provide a good sampling of different uses of RIAs and their advantages. Being pretty is one thing, but being incredibly functional is what makes RIAs exciting. For example, check out http://www.buzzword.com. You can sign up in about 45 seconds and start creating documents that can be saved as Microsoft Word format, RTF or XML (Microsoft Word 2003).