This, like pretty much everything Google does, is really cool. But either I’m becoming an old fogey, or the fact that Google continues to make us more and more reliant on content that exists only on their servers makes me nervous.
In pondering the implications of the AIs in Greg Egan’s Diaspora immersing themselves so completely in virtual realities that they forgot about the real world, I found a simple saying: “You should never forget where your plug is.” The virtual reality may be indistinguishable from the real world in every way while being filled with endless possibilities far beyond the scope of anything the real world may be able to offer: But if the sun goes supernova in the real world, you’re still going to die, no matter how deeply nestled you’ve become in your artificial life.
In reflecting on cloud computing I think it’s equally important to say: “You should never forget where your data is.”
Because the “cloud” is increasingly becoming a buzz word that means, “If Google ever goes away or chooses to shut down a server or decides to start charging for a service, then you’re all screwed.”
Don’t get me wrong: I use GMail, Google Calendar, and Google Reader. I watch videos on Youtube. I search prices on Froogle. Google Books (along with the Internet Archive) is literally revolutionary in making information widely and rapidly accessible. I’m even convinced that Google Wave has the opportunity to replace e-mail. (Although, notably, one of the reasons I believe that is because Wave is an open protocol and not dependent on Google’s servers.)
But whenever I hear about somebody who has lost their entire blog because their hosting company has gone out of business or failed to back up their servers properly, I’m reminded of the importance of knowing where your data is. The Alexandrian, for example, is actually designed so that the primary copy of every document is kept on my local computer. The website itself is the first of several back-ups. And even though that isn’t an option for many blogs, you should still make a point of making a local back-up on a regular basis.
The same applies to anyone who’s keeping their data exclusively on Google Docs, Flickr, Facebook, or anywhere else on the web. The utility of being able to access and manipulate your data from anywhere is great, but the importance of both knowing and controlling the physical location of your data just cannot be stressed enough.
Which is why, for example, I can’t get excited for Google Chrome OS. In fact, it’s why I can’t figure out why anybody is excited about it. This is an operating system which fails to offer even a single unique feature: Everything it can do, other operating systems already do. In fact, the only thing it can uniquely claim to do is to make your computer completely reliant on the “cloud” — in other words, to force you to give up your control over your own data. For some reason this is supposed to be a “feature”, but I can’t fathom what advantage anyone thinks they’re going to get out of it.
RIP Google Reader. The sunsetting of that service is what got me actually considering my dependence on free services in general. It even meant that there were things I was keeping up with pretty well using G Reader, that I barely even think about now, and that change happened about a month after I decided the replacement reader was all faff.
Blast from the past, Mengmoshu. I “love” that almost half of the Google services I linked to in this post no longer exist.
The Alexandrian is no longer primarily hosted on my computer. A proper, server-side CSS is too important. But you’d better believe I regularly back the whole thing up.