The best cloud computing approach
CNET’s Rafe Needleman wrote a piece titled 10 Worst Web glitches of 2008 (so far) which many have used to point out why cloud computing won’t work. I love the idea of using just about any computer to access my data. I am also concerned about the cloud, not only because of reliability but also accessibility. We live in a rural area with a water well, septic tank/field and slow Internet access (grant it, our 144k iDSL is better than dial-up). Even if Internet services were more reliable I still face a bandwidth issue. Plus, there is the issue of access while traveling. Just about any hotel provides Internet access, but some (it appears to be the larger ones) still charge. For example, I stayed at a Marriott hotel in June for a conference and they were charging $10 per day. That was on top of the room charge at this “full service” property.
Yet, I like keeping my data, or some portion of it in the cloud for easy access.
I download my small business email to Outlook via POP which acts as long term storage. All of my other email clients, which are the ones I primarily use on a daily basis, utilize IMAP. This allows me to access recent email from a web browser (i.e. webmail) on any computer, my iMac, or Macbook Pro.
Another favorite hybrid cloud computing app I use is Evernote. My like somewhat manual approach to sync’d email, Evernote stores a copy of my notes online. These notes can be accessed, and sync’d to, my Mac or Windows computers. One weakness, in my opinion, is that the awesome text recognition feature, which can also “read” text from images, is done on the Evernote servers, hence in the cloud. Should the servers or Internet not be available, newly entered local notes would not be searchable. I’d like to see the text recognition feature for non-images take place locally to cover those situations.
I’ve been trying to use Microsoft’s Live Mesh to sync data across multiple machines. The primary problem is that there isn’t a native Mac client, yet. So, accessing my Live Mesh data requires the use of a browser which is clunky. Live Mesh has a lot of promise and the peer-to-peer syncing that Paul Thurrott brought to my attention is very exciting… once there’s a Mac client that supports it. It would be very cool if Evernote supported peer-to-peer sync as well, though I don’t think it’s critical.
It’s all about syncing with a central location, but having access to most, if not all, at any time.
Posted by Al Degutis
