One of the biggest news items this week was an announcement that T-Mobile Sidekick users had all of their online data lost, possibly permanently, by Danger and its parent company Microsoft. After sending this shockwave through the Sidekick community, another announcement followed that the data might be recoverable after all. This is a relief to Sidekick owners, but begs a bigger question – can we really rely on the cloud for the future of computing?
Tag: Web Apps (page 15 of 15)
When you were younger, did you envision a future where we communicated with video consoles, instead of telephones? I sure did. Of course, I also thought we’d all be driving flying cars by now, too. While we’ll all be driving flying cars any day now, video conferencing still has a ways to go before everyone uses it. Skype is great, but requires a computer and the installation of software. Skype also faces some legal obstacles that call its future into question. There’s an option, though, which does away with the installation of software, and let’s you have a video conference from within your web browser. Read on for a look at our experience with Tinychat. Read more
Yesterday, Google announced the Data Liberation Front, "whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products." While this should give users some peace of mind that they won’t be locked into Google products, and even attract some people to Google products, it does raise an important question. Specifically, do we rely on Google too much, such that we should think about spreading our eggs among other baskets? For many of us, it seems that our lives are in Google. I’ll be the first to admit that my productivity is dependent on Google. I use Google Apps, Gmail, Reader, Voice, and Docs, among others. Are you doing this, too? Is this unwise? I’d like to know what you think, in both the poll and comments after the jump.