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.
