Why the Cloud isn't the Internet

I think people are just starting to realize what some of the cloud vendors are providing and their drawbacks.  Steve Jobs is quoted in his biography describing the intent behind iCloud:

We need to be the company that manages your relationship with the cloud - streams your videos and music from the cloud, stores your pictures and information, and maybe even your medical data...over the next few years, the hub is going to move from the computer into the cloud...So we wrote all these apps - iPhoto, iMove, iTunes - and tied in our devices, like the iPod and iPhone and iPad...We can provide all the syncing you need, and that way we can lock in the customer.

The Mac has always been different to Windows.  One of those differences Windows users' notice is that you switch between applications in OS X compared to documents (or windows) in Windows. The Apple cloud maintains that pattern by syncing between applications rather than documents (or individual files).  This approach confuses a lot of people.

This is different to how most Mac users currently sync their files with Dropbox.  iCloud has ended up following its Mac heritage whereas Dropbox sticks to file syncing.  Matthew writes:

The difference between Dropbox and iCloud synchronization is that Dropbox is theoretically just a file system...If you have a document that you edit on your iPad and sync with Dropbox you can edit that same file, using a different application, on your PC...The iCloud experience is completely different. The only way to edit a document across platforms or devices is to use a version of the application for each device. Not a compatible application...it may actually make me change the desktop application that I use purely based on iCloud support.

If you want to read more about Dropbox and Apple there's a really good article in Forbes which details how Steve Jobs personally made an offer to buy Dropbox.

The edges of iCloud - the integration points to applications and the operating system - it's incomplete even if you buy into the idea of applications over documents.

For example, on iOS devices there is a Notes application but on OS X these notes are in a tab in the Mail application.  This seems like a weird and non-standard place to put it - if you are going to sync by application you'd think it should be the same application across platforms.

In iCloud for Windows, Windows users get more choice than OS X users.  Mail, Contacts and Calendar integrate with Outlook but you can choose your application for Bookmarks (IE or Safari) and Photo Stream.

Even within applications Apple haven't quite gotten syncing right with iCloud yet either including the new rules around where files are stored and what is automatically removed or backed up.

The cloud is about vendor lock as much as any other platform, like application servers or databases, but with the extra problem that your data is tied to the vendor's application, cloud and user base.  A stickier solution.

Some, like Google and Facebook, offer export services, but these almost don't matter, because you get an almost useless hunk of data, lose the ability to run the applications and you can't access users on their network (who may well have been collaborators).

With the Internet, the Web and open source you still have the possibility to use your data with applications shared by many people across different networks.

Identifying with the Web

URIs and the Myth of Resource Identity "Another way to put it is that the authoritative descriptive information that I publish licenses the use of my URI in certain models. This is analogous to publishing some interfaces for an object in an object oriented system. You can never be sure that I won't (monotonically) publish an additional interface at some point in the future, just as you cannot be sure I won't publish more descriptive information about me..."

"On the other hand, even if it is not possible to completely describe a resource, it may be possible to unambiguously identify that resource, in the sense of conveying what resource it is, as distinct from all other possible resources.
For example, if I provide descriptive information telling you that the URI http://t-d-b.org?http://dbooth.org/2005/dbooth/ identifies all-and-only the actual, living person with email address dbooth@hp.com as of 1-Jan-2005, that is sufficient to unambiguously identify me, distinct from all other possible resources."

"The ability to uniquely identify a resource -- in the sense of conveying the distinction between this resource and all other resources -- is important because it enables others to publish additional descriptive information about the resource, beyond what the URI owner provides. The Semantic Web is all about the network effect created by the use of URIs as universal identifiers. When a URI's resource is uniquely identified, it enables "anyone to say anything" about that resource[4].

"If a URI's resource is not uniquely identified -- if others must rely solely on authoritative descriptive information about that resource -- then those who wish to make statements about it run the risk that they may have guessed wrong about what resource the URI owner was intending to identify. This hampers others' ability to make statements about that resource, thus diminishing the value of that URI. This is analogous to connecting, to the telephone network, a telephone that nobody wants to call: it consumes resources without contributing anything to the network effect."

Via, URIs and the Myth of Resource Identity.

Related to, Why Different Things are the Same and Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One.

Burst of Links

• As everyone knows OS X's default behaviour is to replace a folder not merge it. Luckily, there's Apple's free FileMerge utility.


• Peter Singer: The Ethics of What We Eat mentioning his books "Unsanctifying Human Life: Essays on Ethics" and "The Way We Eat : Why Our Food Choices Matter" - providing more than one example of the differences between moral and religious. His entry on animals also reinforces this. His essay "The Singer Solution to World Poverty" reminded me of the recent Richard Curtis movie "The Girl In The Café".


• The Asymmetric Web "Then began an awful period - which continues to this day, sadly -- of companies developing intranet applications and then concluding, erroneously, that the application can be deployed on the Web by just flicking the proverbial switch."


• Redux: Enterprise Software Licensing on Life Support "...by 2008 conventional software licenses will account for less than 10% of total revenues for all software companies, and less than 20% for leading enterprise search vendors..."


• Converting Between XML and JSON "In an ideal world, the resulting JSON structure can be converted back to its original XML document easily. Thus it seems worthwhile to discuss some common patterns as the foundation of a potentially bidirectional conversion process between XML and JSON."


• On First-Order-Logic Databases "We have demonstrated an equivalence between dependency statements (or functional dependencies) of a relational database on the one hand and of implicational statements of propositional logic on the other hand." Hopefully this means what I think it means.