On the surface it looks like I haven’t been blogging much of late. Actually I have – it’s just that I stopped going as far as publishing my posts. In an effort to tidy up at least one workspace this weekend, I present a not-quite-finished discussion about cloud computing, data safety and trust.

Very few of us actually stop to read the terms and conditions when we sign up for the newest interweb application. Google has our news, email, our documents and our most private browsing history. We give Flickr, Facebook and Bebo all of our family’s and friend’s secrets. We try and be droll in Twitter and then complain bitterly when their servers buckle under the load.

But we don’t think about paying the bills. And sooner or later they have to be paid. If not with our money, then with something else …

Every weekend I give myself time to catch up with Boing Boing (the directory of wonderful things). One of last weekend’s treats was a link to a talk about moving stuff off the cloud and back to our own spaces.

From Danny O’Brien’s slides (couldn’t cope with the video for long – it gave me motion sickness):

The sacrifice … is user autonomy. If you decide that Google Docs doesn’t work the way you want, you can’t tinker with the software and fix it. If you want to share a map on your Web site, you need Yahoo!’s permission. If you want to use a new social networking site, you have to re-enter all your personal data and re-invite all your friends. The data and code belong to someone else, and they’re hidden behind servers that you, the user, aren’t allowed to touch.  — Evan Prodromou, identi.ca

Regularly I find myself an unwilling participant in games of “lets play with the latest toy”. I’ve done the synchronous co-construct in a Google Doc often enough to know that the constant refreshing will drive any real thoughts of collaborative writing out of the window.

But regularly I am seduced by the promise of true collaboration and aspiring to true geekhood. So once again I sit with my co-constructors waiting for the Google Doc to stop scrolling, surreptitiously checking my email while in front of my bedazzled eyes every websearch, every GChat, indeed all of my email and shared files are quickly searched and indexed.

So should we panic? Afterall Google’s mantra is  “don’t be evil” and they are the good guys … right?

According to Tim O’Reilly in an essay about Open Source and Cloud Computing, it will be alright in the end.

In short, we’re a long way from having all the answers, but we’re getting there. Despite all the possibilities for lock-in that we see with Web 2.0 and cloud computing, I believe that the benefits of openness and interoperability will eventually prevail, and we’ll see a system made up of cooperating programs that aren’t all owned by the same company, an internet platform, that, like Linux on the commodity PC architecture, is assembled from the work of thousands. Those who are skeptical of the idea of the internet operating system argue that we’re missing the kinds of control layers that characterize a true operating system. I like to remind them that much of the software that is today assembled into a Linux system already existed before Linus wrote the kernel. Like LA, 72 suburbs in search of a city, today’s web is 72 subsystems in search of an operating system kernel. When we finally get that kernel, it had better be open source.

Can we afford to wait?

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