New Media Buzz

If you’re a Star Wars nerd (guilty), what probably came to mind when the phrase “cloud computing” came into public use this past year was an image of Cloud City, the floating metropolis governed by Billy Dee Williams (nee Lando Calrissian) in the The Empire Strikes Back (you know, episode two, er, five, of the series). What could be bad about that?

Well, cloud computing isn’t about living in the clouds. It’s about web-based applications—having your computer applications and ultimately your data on somebody’s server out there in (cliché alert) cyberspace so you can access it anywhere you want. And when you put it like that with private companies holding on to your data, the “new hope” people love about Star Wars seems to morph into the darkness of The Matrix or The Terminator. It’s how so many internet-related issues get presented in the media—a battle between access and privacy.

Yet, as the mainstream media fans the flames of that debate to bump up circulation/ratings, the online community, both public and private has moved toward demanding (and providing) greater and greater access, although what they’re willing to give up to get that access remains unclear.

The “cloud” was, of course, there at the birth of the Internet where businesses and individuals agreed to offer up their information to hosting facilities and internet service providers. And it has only gotten bigger since then. More and more people use webmail apps as their only email service. Most users have no qualms about loading vast amounts of personal information onto Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, or whatever social networking platform they use. And the granddaddy of them all, Google, offers all of the above: Google Docs (word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and more), Google Calendar (just what you think it is), Gmail (ditto), Picassa (photo sharing/editing), etc., etc., etc.

Many of these applications are incredibly popular and continue to grow at breakneck speed because people enjoy the access. Still, every couple of news cycles, there is a big media storm about some issue of personal privacy or more specifically personal primacy, that is to say “whose rights come first?”, the application’s or the individual’s.

The most recent example of this was Facebook’s rather dismal handling of its revision of their Terms of Service (TOS). Facebook stated that users who used the social networking platform and uploaded pictures, messages, etc. were essentially giving Facebook ownership of that content in perpetuity (even if users cancelled their accounts). When users heard the word “ownership,” thousands of them balked (okay, maybe it was a little stronger than that). Yet Robert Scoble among others didn’t see what the fuss was about. As he blogged on Scobleizer, “If you are uploading your content to, and participating online with, you are giving a HUGE amount of ownership to services that, well, you really don’t control.” Facebook, of course, quickly backed off the new TOS language. Sure they still have tremendous control of everything we upload to the site, but they’re no longer claiming to “own” us and they’re giving us the great platform we want, so we forgive them.

Google, however, hasn’t made that same mistake. They just keep on coming up with services we want. And they keep compiling our information and using it to generate big piles of ad revenue. (Imagine what it will be like when they launch gDrive, an online virtual hard drive where we can store anything and everything we want.) Wisely, Google never explicitly claims “ownership” of our data, which is why we’re still boyfriend/girlfriend. Sure they get to hear all our secrets, but we’re getting what we want out of the deal too. Will Google stay true to their “Don’t Be Evil” mission statement? Who knows?

What we do know is that web-based apps will continue to grow because people want the access. Furthermore, as we become more reliant on mobile apps, we’ll extend our dependence on the distributed web even more. Is there a downside? If there is, it’s listed on those TOS documents so many of us click on without reading when we add an app. For now we’re on cloud nine with Google and most of the other web-based applications. And aside from the occasional hostile takeover by the Empire, what could be better than living among the clouds?

(Disclosure: Emerge creates web-based apps and offers web-hosting services to our clients.)

Hat-tip to Adam Fox for today’s theme. Image from Wookiepedia.