Cloud Computing, Cloud Services, Cloudy days and Clear Skies Ahead!

It has been the buzz for a while online to talk about cloud services.  Now the traditional press has picked it up and it seems to be everywhere.  For some things, Yahoo! Mail, gmail, and the other online mail services, its a big yawn.  They have been cloud services for quite a long time.  People have gotten so used to them they have been forgotten.  MediaMaster (shameless plug) is a cloud service for your music and was designed from day one to be that way.  Flickr was a web site for posting images, but now it is a cloud space for your pictures.  It seems that to be a cloud service, a site has to not appear as a website, but be an actual application that is useful that is not installed on your PC.

There is a fine line between web sites and cloud services.  Even information sites (blogs, wikipedia.org, and mainstream media sites) can be considered cloud services.  Their information is available through a variety of orifices (RSS, WAP, SMS, Cell, applets, and email) but they still don’t really DO anything.  Once you begin interacting, it starts turning into a Cloud Service.  Google Maps and Y! Maps have gotten more and more interactive to the point of being like standalone mapping apps, except they don’t work in Bear, Idaho since there is no net connection to speak of.

Should Cloud services be constrained to the sky?  Or should companies start writing new buggy downloadable applications that don’t work unless they are connected?  In that case, what is the point of installing it?  Things like Adobe AIR, and Microsoft Silverlight will blur that line.  They will use your GPU finally so you can have some speed to your graphics on web apps making things seem faster and making you feel better that your $200 graphics card is doing something other than showing JPEG images.  Local system access will make them more like apps than web sites or clunky Java craplets.

When you think of cloud services, think of how you are used to using your local information and see how close you are to using it in the same manner on the web.  There are complex design tradeoffs required to make a local app into a web app.  The same is true to make a web site into a fully interactive and app like experience.  Just adding AJAX to a site does not a cloud service make.  Cloud services are now extending their reach onto smartphones, game consoles and other devices.  As their network becomes available everywhere, the traditional web will give way to the optimal experience for the current viewing/consuming device.  At that point, true cloud services will exist.

When does Web 2.0 become Web 3.0?

One thing that is missing these days is useful web applications.  People are trying and they will be even better over the next year.  One thing that is overlooked in web apps, is the need for a fast browsing machine.  Trying to use something like Yahoo Mail, Google Maps, and other simple web apps on an older machine is brutal.  Modern browsers are pigs and adding Flash, heavy Javascript and other AJAX stuff will really bog a machine down.  However, as people replace their machines, these apps are worth a look again and will become the future of applications.  The web is becoming document centric.

 

There is a class of personal documents that the web is good for and some that are bad.  Oddly enough, people are inverted in how it handles the file types.  Spreadsheets, simple documents, data files (Quicken, etc) are small and are quick and easy on the web.  However, these are often people’s most private files and most fear putting them up there.  Photos, music, and movies are big and slow yet people have been throwing them onto the web with wild abandon. As people become more comfortable with the big files, they will then move to start to use the web as backup and primary storage for these docs.

 

Realistically, an Office suite and a browser are the only programs anyone needs anymore on a computer.  Maybe Quicken if you don’t like to do your own online banking.  Your photos are up in Flickr, Kodak, Snapfish, etc.  That’s because the photos you want to share need to be on the web.  Your home machine ends up being the backup system for all of your photos, but the important ones are out on the web.  Most people have done that with their email for a long time, HotMail, Y! Mail, AOL and GMail have proven that.

 

Photos pushed that edge in 2001 since they required real bandwidth to upload them, mail never required that, as it was mostly text.  As megapixel count as increased, so has photo size and the ability to fill that digital pipe from your home.  We, at MediaMaster, are doing the same for your music.  Upload it all and access it from anywhere.  Your home machine ends up being a backup system for your iPod.  You can get to your music from anywhere including your smartphone.  There is the initial pain of uploading but that can be done in the background, just like uploading images.  Once everything is there, you just listen.  We feel that it is different than photos and the next step towards 3.0 web apps.  

 

With photos, you put them up purely to share with others.  Your backup is at home.  With your music, we have turned the web into active storage.  You can interact with your music like you do from iTunes.  In my case, I have a Mac Mini hooked up to the stereo and TV at my house.  My music collection is in the cloud and the playback system is a 500$ computer.  If I want, I can go to a friends house and get to that same music.  Or my office.  Or my in-laws.  No iPod to worry about charging or connecting to a foreign stereo.  The fact that ubiquitous access (most places I go) exists in your personal world makes it possible.  

 

People use music and for photos differently.  Typically, you edit your photos on the powerful home machine.  Cropping, red-eye removal, resizing, and color correcting require a beefy computer and good bandwidth.  Remote storage is too slow for that.  However, once published, tagging and rearranging slideshows is easily done on the web.  With music, your rip your CDs at home which requires hardware and speed.  Once it is on your computer, very few people actually edit music.  Most people make playlists and might correct the metadata tags.  These require no bandwidth and can be easily done on the web.  Adding new music to my account is easy with the sync client and then I don’t have to worry about making sure it’s on my laptop.  Or desktop.  Or wife’s computer.

 

It just makes life easier.  I don’t have to worry as much about home backups.  Cloud computing takes care of that for you.  Very rarely does a service company fail completely.  People are better at building highly reliable systems and the systems themselves are much better than they were just 5 years ago.  Connectivity issues are the main problems today, not hardware failure at some remote site.  And if it does go down, it’s usually a few hours to have things up and running again.  As for remote access, not having a big hole in your home firewall makes life easy.  You also get better bandwidth from a central location than from a crappy home connection.  And, did I mention, you don’t have to manage your own home server?

 

Will people even notice the transition from Web 2 to Web 3?  Probably not.  Already people are blending what happens on their home computer with the web access.  Google Earth is not possible without the web.  Just try to run it with no connection.  Pretty boring.  People use to buy mapping applications like that.  Games might be the last frontier.  They are fully online for the interesting interactivity part, but require really fast local processing to make them pretty.  As the home bandwidth increases, you might not need 5 DVD-ROMs full of graphics to run it.  Just go to the site and start streaming.  Second Life is not very compelling compared to a modern game, but it is getting there.  Certainly prettier than the virtual worlds of 10 years ago.

 

Pick and choose for yourself what you want on the web.  Try MediaMaster for a bit and see how handy it is.  Try other websites that have no installation requirements, see if they make things more convenient or not.  there is usually something for everyone.  Our guess is that active applications are the future.  Not dumb storage – why just have your messy hard drive on the web when you can use the files directly from the web.

 

Welcome to the future.

Old Computers and Flash SSD

I have an older Tablet PC (NEC Versa Litepad) that has a super form factor but was hobbled by the technology of the time.  A slow CPU, not much RAM, and a terrible early 1.8 inch hard drive.  I always liked the idea of it more than using it.  I read a lot of Zinio magazines and took notes for a while, but battery life and machine performance were bad.  So it turned into a rarely used utility machine at my house.That has changed now.  I recently was exploring flash SSD drives and thought to try one out, but they are not large enough yet for a real work machine.  However, I thought I might try it in the tiny form factor for my Tablet.

WHAT A HUGE DIFFERENCE!!!

I backed up the old drive and restored onto the new 32 GB Samsung flash drive and rebooted.  Amazingly, it worked fine and far better than the old drive.  I would say it has completely transformed the machine into a useful home tablet.  It is now silent, it sleeps and wakes almost instantly.  The drive no longer grinds away swapping all of the time (not much RAM on that machine, just 512 MB (too small for modern XP on a slow CPU)).I think the real problem with  that machine was clearly the drive and the awful seek times those 1.8 inch drives have.  It’s fine for streaming work like an iPod, but an OS (especially XP) is always hunting around on the disk for whatever garbage Windows seems to be doing.  The drive access light is right on top of the tablet and it now blinks a lot, but it used to be solidly on with the old HD.  And you could hear to the old drive chugging away the whole time!  Battery life is much longer because I can tune the sleep cycles much more aggressively than before.  Even full hibernate and recover can happen in the same amount of time it used to take to wake from sleep.

The machine is now sitting near where I sit in the house.  I can grab it for simple news reading as I sit and watch TV, I can change my music (Slimp3 players), and I can do more casual web surfing from around the house.  No more huddling in front of the laptop for simple web surfing. Funny how everything old is new again!  A simple phase change is all that was needed to make a dud technology really work for a geeky consumer.  I think tablets are the right machine for having around the house, but not great for real work.

Now I have my electronic newspaper on the table. 

This is a test version of a radio link to my MediaMaster account. It should play my radio tracks!

This is another test for widgets.  Not sure if they can be embedded or not. Of course I am testing my blogging as well. It seems easy, but I have to start somewhere! It seems that I can’t embed my flash widget anywhere in here Here is my radio station though!

Paper list moving to electronic

I have things to write about. In fact, I have a paper list of things to expound upon. Some are extensions of other’s ideas and some are my own synthesis of thoughts that are out there already. This should be fun to try to get my thoughts out.