living in the clouds

The Newshour with Jim Lehrer last night did a story on cloud computing that was rather comical at times — “You mean other people can see that spreadsheet?” — but laid out the basic issues well enough. However, the show was extremely Google-centric: its primary example of “living in the cloud” was a woman who keeps track of her family’s life via Google apps — a woman who just happens to be a Google employee who (apparently) works on Google docs. And a lot of the segment was built around an interview with Eric Schmidt, who encourages us all to “trust the professionals” to back up our data and keep it safe.

But which professionals? See, there are many clouds out there, and it’s not clear that they’re all equally safe, equally reliable, equally honest. Now, you may not plan to out anything in the cloud if you can help it — but if you do, then who do you trust? Google has a ton of my information because I use Gmail; but, though I have fooled around with Google Calendar and other Google services, I do a good deal of my life-organizing with Backpack. So who is more trustworthy, Google — one of the most powerful corporations in the world, who gives me their services for free but mines my account for data — or 37signals, a small company who charges me a fee for their services but promises not to use or share my data?

Many factors need to be considered when answering this question. There’s the issue of diversification: Would I do well to prevent one company from controlling all my data? And I haven't even mentioned the difficulties that can arise when you’re trying to export your data or otherwise pry it from the cloud’s clutches. But though I’ve thought about these matters a lot, I don't think I understand them very well. This is all too new.

evicted!

One of my first posts on this blog was about the rather sudden and unexpected shutdown of two web services, Stikkit and Sandy, and the anger that shutdown prompted against the services’ providers. We’re going to be hearing many more such stories, I think, during the recession/depression. Sites that have been funded by VCs while their creators have been trying to come up with a business plan are going to find themselves out of cash, and are going to shut down, and their users — accustomed to free services — are going to be seriously ticked off. And of course larger companies are going to be closing down unprofitable projects, with similar consequences. There’s even a website devoted to tracking such closings: It Died.

It Died took me to a really interesting rant by Jason Scott about the closing of AOL Hometown. (And there’s a follow-up rant here.) Jason’s point is that, just as landlords can't simply evict a renter for no cause and with no warning but have to follow carefully specified procedures, so too virtual landlords shouldn't be given unlimited right of eviction. There needs to be, Jason says, some kind of website eviction law — or, failing that, a volunteer Archive Team that vacuums up the data of doomed websites and hosts it until people can rescue their data. (Jason came up with the volunteer idea after his legal ideas were descended upon by the SLV.*)

I don't know what I think about all this, except that there seems to be more and more to be said for the 37signals philosophy: if the creators of web services charge money for their product, they’re more likely to be able to keep offering it. The people at Jott, an excellent phone-to-web service for reminders and to-do lists, have come to this conclusion: they’re eliminating their free plan. Howls of outrage to commence immediately.

*Slashdot Libertarian Vigilantes