I guess you are all familiar with mainstream on-line offerings such as Hotmail, Gmail, Skydrive, GoogleDocs, WordPress, YouTube, etc, etc. I guess you are also familiar with more advanced on-line end-user software such as Slideshare, iStockphoto and Vimeo.

These apps are getting better every day.

Recently, I really stumbled upon Issuu. Maybe i was living on another planet, but i never saw any real good coverage of this in most frequent magazines, news-sites or blogs.

Issuu (pronounced ‘issue’) is a dedicated team who strive for excellence in online publishing. They launched the first public version of their service in December 2007. Since February 2007, they are  venture-backed by Sunstone Capital.

First of all, the site experience is fantastic. But then the content ! All the finest magazines, creative works, sorted and filtered by all sorts of criteria.

You can publish yourselves in basically any format, and once uploaded you have a fantastic on-line reader with Silverlight/Adobe like Rolodex experience. And of course, their site has standard Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, FriendFeed, MySpace option. Looks and feels all very very professional, including a nice press-kit.

Small detail: these guys are still in Beta ! Sets the bar for anybody planning to offer some on-line experience, and gives you an idea how fast this sort of SaaS software will become a real competitor for on-premise software.

Some people us Issuu to publish niche creative initiatives or are trying to promote new creative talents through this channel. Good example is the AddictLab, the brainchild of yet another Flemish guy Jan Van Mol, who recently re-launched LabFiles via this on-line Issue Publishing platform.

Issuu.com is also a real recommendation if you have one of those “off” days: go a stroll around on this site, and get fueled with fresh creative ideas and energy. You’ll feel revitalized !