My head just isn’t in the clouds
Don’t get me wrong, I welcome the era of open-computing, APIs and shared computing. I just can’t trust it yet. I can’t help think that I’m simply not ready to build anything on a cloud.
Recently Gmail has been acting, let’s say, “buggy”, to be kind, around the same time it launched it’s task manager service. Meanwhile Yahoo has been having a few financial hiccups of its own. And these are the big boys. Twitter has been up longer than usual, but you just know we’ll see the whale again. I recently tinkered with BOSS with another service’s API. All was good until the service went down for a bit. The first thing I could think of was, “Thank goodness I’m not charging for this”. Right now, when Google hiccups, my sites slow down, searches don’t work and there’s nothing I can do. Mind you, I’m only taking into account reliability issues, but what if the cloud’s pillars… shift?
I won’t get into the countless Terms of Agreements I’ve never fully read (though I still checked off the boxes indicating that I did), but I’m sure many of them hint at injecting ads and the like eventually. There’s nothing like finding out one day your application is behaving differently.
With all this said, I truly admire all the brave startups willing to build on top of this less than stable foundation, and having the brains and the wit to foresee all these problems and plan ahead.
As we’ve seen the internet born from a need to make a more robust and survivable network, perhaps the cloud is the beginning of a similar phenomenon? Could we see cloud services duplicated, networked and shared in a way that if Google goes down, we can still check our Gmail (and heaven forbid, plan our tasks)? I like to think so.
Until then, I’ll just have multiple e-mail accounts.
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