![Keep Your Clouds [Opinion]](http://images.techtree.com/ttimages/story/93907_matter.jpg)
Keep Your Clouds [Opinion]
Ewigen Zyniker, Oct 07, 2008 1047 hrs IST
...and just give me the Web as I want it
Once again, I find myself an unfortunate victim of marketing blather that I don't understand, which in turn makes me feel old even at this tender age. For I remember a Web that was buzzword-free. Ish. This time, of course, it's Cloud Computing. One way to insulate yourself from the confusion these terms create is to realize this Simple Truth: these terms make more sense to the people cooking them up than they ever will to you or me. Ever. While they jabber on about The Cloud and Web 3.0, all we really need to know is that the Web is getting better.
And it is, too-when you sift through all the gibberish, there is something concrete under this cloud.
The Creators
Ask yourself: did you really notice when we went from Web 1.0 to 2.0? One thing we've learned from all this time online is that there's always something new to discover on the Internet. So instead giving it a name, chances are that, like mine, your first reaction to this new creature was, "Hmm. I like. I want more." Remember how cool it was that Gmail didn't need to reload the entire page to update your inbox? Web 2.0 was just something new and cool we'd discovered on the Internet.
However, while you sat back and enjoyed the coolness, Web developers lost plenty of sleep getting that to you. One of the first thing they came up with was AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), which demanded that the oft-abused and generally unruly JavaScript be treated with the same seriousness as any other programming language. XML would gain even more popularity, taking form as RSS feeds, for example. While the developers experimented with the possibilities of this new technology, you wound up on a Web where you weren't a passive reader-you started interacting with the Big Forces on the Internet, not to mention each other. Sites became apps, and you could even make them interact with each other to create mashups.
While we enjoyed what we thought was a natural process of the Web getting better, developers' approach to creating Internet applications changed significantly, and they likely felt compelled to qualify it somehow. So in typical developerspeak, the Web got a new version number-2.0. Which was fine, till it was bandied about by marketing executives and generally anyone who thought they needed to be identified as "hip" and "with it". That's when things started going to pot.
However, hating a buzzword doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
The Web Is Changing
As with ye olde Web 1.0, there's no shortage of newness on the Web today. Even when Gmail was pass , we didn't really expect to have a whole office suite online. Then we heard about applications like JumpCut, which let you edit video online (and here we thought we had to use Windows Movie Maker or pirate Adobe Premiere for video editing). And the fact that they're online means that it's someone else's processor doing the dirty work, not yours. Which means that you could edit video even from your phone's browser. Which, in turn, means that you can edit video from anywhere. Well, in an ideal world where phones don't have teeny screens and you get megabit Internet speeds on the go. But you get the point.
And you're using these applications too. So is this the Web 2.0 they've been talking about? Maybe, but the term they like more is Cloud Computing. In essence, it's like outsourcing computing to a "cloud" of computers. Yet you went about your business not caring what they called it, yes? Larry Ellison's right: "The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can't think of anything that isn't cloud computing with all of these announcements."
Our phones aren't (and likely won't be for a while) capable of editing video or storing terabytes of data, so using someone else's computing power seems to be a good plan. As a perk, you get to use your data in one application in others-use Google Docs to publish documents as blog post, or e-mail them to someone, for example. Right now, though, this only seems to be the case with applications made by the same company.
It's a trap, Stallman says. Getting you to put data online gives the companies undue power over your information. Worse, what if you got charged? Now that Gmail's indispensable to most of us, what happens if Google asks you to cough up for the service? The potential evilness of a company is definitely a possibility, but if we spent our lives assuming that the companies are out to get us, we'd all be offline Linux users, printing out documents to share with each other.
You And Your Web
There's one overpowering reason that companies may think twice before going evil on the Web-you. Think about it: IE got annoying, so you took Firefox on a meteoric rise. Apple tried to shut developers up, you raised hell, Apple decided to lift their NDA altogether. Just like democratic governments are supposed to be afraid of the people, companies on the Web should be-and are-afraid of you.
What we all really need to do is to let the marketing monkeys worry about tosh like Cloud Computing and Web 3.0. I'm just going to keep doing what I do online, and most importantly, keep discovering.
USER COMMENTS
Totally agree. All this bulltalk about cloud this and cloud that... jst give us our Internet!
by telome, b'bay, on Oct 07, 2008 10:57 AM, Report abuse Reply
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well said... Ewigen Zyniker. Thoroughly interesting to read this. it's almost like speaking to yourself. :)
by Jay T, Mumbai, India, on Oct 07, 2008 01:13 PM, Report abuse Reply