Online Video consumption and participation in social networks will move increasingly to desktop applications with the release of AIR, says Adobe VP David Wadhwani.

Earlier this week I was in San Francisco for the Adobe Engage,the industry introduction of AIR.  This is my final segment from the conference.

David explains how the utility of Flash has been transformed into the "virtual machine" of AIR. He says that the technology increases performance of applications typically by 10X and sometimes as much as 1000X.

He explained that AIR will soon be integrated into the Web experience as part of Mozilla’s Tamarin Project.

There is quite alot of buzz now about Web applications moving to the desktop with news anticipated next week from Microsoft.

Robert Scoble wonders if this movement to desktop applications is a good thing. He’s got a good point: Many of us use multiple computers and switch between operating systems.  We lose them and they crash.    But surely iTunes has proven that consumers want to organize and consume media on an application. 

For more on the Adobe philosophy of offline/online, check out this post by Adobe evangelist Ryan Stewart.

— Andy Plesser