AquaMinds Weblog

Do you know where your documents are and who is protecting them? Are they on your desktop or somewhere in the cloud?  In recent weeks, there has been a lively discussion about the merits as well as the risks of having one giant disk drive accessible from the Internet (aka in the cloud).  It's not a new idea either.  Many companies as well as industry visionaries have long talked about the notion of a very thin client device that would go everywhere you go while your data was served up from a central data center (remember the Grid Compass?).  All of YOUR data would be universally accessible but kept in one place on the Internet by a third party, not you.

Far-fetched?  It's happening now and has been happening. Google is, in theory, working on their Google Planet system; most likely a globally-scaled operating system with a disk drive called GDrive designed to store every last bit of information known to humankind (mirroring your local drive's data as well).  No, this is not an April Fool's Day joke either.  It's the end result of billions of dollars of confidence and abundant hubris focused on a semi-interesting problem; how to create a worldwide, seamless grid of information at your fingertips.  The problem is that I don't want Google or Yahoo! to manage all of MY data.  Or Microsoft.  Or even Apple for that matter.  Look, these sites and services have enough of our data already but at some point,  we want control (and some security/privacy with subpoena-free protection).  Why can't I have my own personal cloud running from my own hardware that is accessible 24x7?  Really, what's the big deal?  Isn't the whole point of personal computing to maintain freedom from Big Brother?

Writely or wrongly (pun absolutely intended), I am sticking to the power and elegance of the desktop application to give me the best of all worlds.  When I use desktop applications, I have the freedom to create and roll my own information, online or off-line.  NoteShare allows me to share globally while enabling notebook collaboration, aggregation, synchronization and communication on demand.  And, I can mix both desktop and webtop (Web 2.0 services) together in one place.  So, if your ideal future vision is living inside the browser then we already do that too.  But at the end of the day, I will always sleep better knowing that some of MY data is still under my control on my local disk drive.