Serendipity35

This past month, I gave up two laptops and two desktop computers from my old job and gained a new laptop and new desktop for my current position.

New computers are nice and shiny and virus-free and empty of all the fragments of deleted files and downloaded software tests that remain even after you defrag and all that. However, given a choice I would have hung on to my older machines to avoid the installation of all the programs that I use regularly (some of which I no longer have access to for now), customizing the setting in browsers, the preferences in programs and copying my backups of presentations, documents and other files.

It gives me a renewed appreciation for cloudware.

Cloudware is software that runs on Internet servers rather than on your hard drive. They require little or no installation/download. It is also referred to as "Software as a Service" (SaaS) and it has some connections to what you may have heard called "thin-client devices" (hardware or even software where all the real processing is done on a server and not on the device you are using).

I believe the term cloudware was popularized in Wired magazine's Geekipedia section:

"The network is the computer," Sun's chief researcher, John Gage, prophesied in 1984 — and lo, it has come to pass. Apps and services that once would have run on a desktop operating system now run in the cloud: the unbounded, ever-shifting, intangible collection of servers that make up the Internet. Go to Google Maps, Yahoo Mail, or MySpace — most of Web 2.0, in other words — and you're using cloudware. (In the enterprise market, it's called software as a service.) Paradoxically, though, the power of your PC matters as much as ever. With P2P apps like BitTorrent, Skype, and the Joost video service, your desktop itself is a critical droplet in the cloud.

If you store your photos at Flickr rather than installing a photo-organizing software package on your computer, that's cloudware. To use cloudware, all you should need is a Web browser and an Internet connection.

There are many apps that have gotten wide attention - like Google Docs and Spreadsheets - and new ones coming online every day. It's hard to keep up.

Here's one that a colleague just showed me last week that we thought we might be able to use. It's Connotea at http://www.connotea.org where you can save and organize links to your references by saving a link to a web page for the reference. Connotea, wherever possible, is recognizing the reference and automatically adding in the bibliographic information for you. You assign keywords/tags to your references. These can be anything you like, and you can use as many as you like, so there's no more need to navigate complicated hierarchies of folders and categories. Connotea shows you all the tags you've ever used, so it's easy to get back to a reference once you've saved it.

So, why not just have everything in the network cloud? The two biggest fears are access and privacy.

Without an Internet connection, you can't access the application or any files you have stored on servers. Try showing grandma the pictures of the new baby that you have online in her apartment that has no Internet. How do you get the spreadsheet for the meeting when the connection fails?

On the privacy side, some people just aren't comfortable with allowing someone else to hold all their data of documents, images etc. Is Google looking at my documents or spreadsheet numbers? I can assign "private" access to my photos on most storage sites, but what guarantee do I have that no one else sees them? What happens to all my files if the company disappears or turns into a pay rather than free service?

Personally, I like storing files in the clouds, but I also keep local copies. I prefer the ability to be able to still work on my files offline too. Let's say that I make a diagram using Gliffy (a free web diagram creation service) that also allows me to share the diagram with others that I am working with on a project. That's a great use of the cloud. Even better is that I can also save the diagrams in the SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) file format and then import this file into other diagramming tools that I have installed on my computer. It's the best of both worlds of earth and sky.