Tags in the sky...

I was all about moving data into the Cloud back when it wasn't called the Cloud [1]. I think my switch to Gmail (mid 2005 I think) was behind this, the brief honeymoon of "OMG lots of reliable storage" and all that. Problem is that Cloud services tend to die off at an alarming rate, certainly a lot more regularity than I manage to kill off hard drives.

I recall once had an enormous collection of random notes stored in plain ASCII text files, etc etc that I moved over to Google Notebook, because "OMG cloud" and "Google would never kill off a service which people rely on". Turned out that, well, yes they did pretty much kill it off (they're "not actively develop[ing]" it, which means they're going to kill it off as soon as they think nobody will notice, just like when Yahoo redefined "foreseeable future" as "June 2009"). Cute offer to move all my stuff to Google Docs; "hey, we're killing off a popular service without a real business model, but you might want to try moving your stuff to our Docs service, which has no business model". Thanks for that, Google.

And how about AOL Hometown, anyone? [2] Yeah, not a "cloud" as we know it (although it is by my earlier definition), but think about it. A service that had been around in some form since the early days of commercial Interwebs, hosting countless memories and giving countless AOL noobs their own little poorly-designed-but-cosy corner of the Web. Hey, with the number of hits that the average AOL homepage got, I could have run that off a RAID-totin' Pentium 233 from my DSL line, or at least out of my own rather shallow pockets. Recap: That was a whole 12 megabytes of static content per user. Nope. Gone. Not economical. Gotta show people that we're doing something to improve our results this quarter, history be damned.

(A better example, on the subject of AOL, is Ficlets, another service AOL killed off. Each story on Ficlets, of which there were less than 50 thousand, could be a maximum of 1024 bytes in length. Do the math: most computers you could fish out a dumpster could host that. Woohoo, stick a £400 tape drive in it, google "mysqldump", and you'll be an order of magnitude less retarded than Magnolia!)

My point (and I'm sure I had one) isn't that AOL is bad, or Yahoo or Google are bad, or even that killing off services isn't a bad thing (it is though). Sure, business doesn't care about the fact that, well, you might care about your many years' worth of data and your preserved memories; perhaps I can't fault them for it. But when we're told at the same time, "look! Shiny! Move everything you have into the cloud!". Pardon a rare interjection of unpleasant language into my writing, but fuck that shit.

Maybe I'm missing something here. Seriously, there's nothing in the world I would like better than to move everything I have into the Cloud. It'd make my life a load easier. But it's not going to happen.

tl;dr: don't trust the Cloud. Yes, that statement makes me a hypocrite (I'm in mah Gmail, posting Flickr pictures to mah Posterous, heh heh), and definitely someone that doesn't sleep too well at night. Time to get a RAID card, I think. :D

[1] As far as I can tell, this is just a very silly name for what used to be called "putting your stuff on the Internet". Just like "Web 2.0" meant "share your stuff with other people", as if that weren't the whole point of the Internet or something. Oh, add collaboration, social networking and gradients, I guess.

[2] Even funnier related tirade from the same guy here. Search ahead for "encouraged you to come in and place items" for possibly the funniest paragraph written in all the history of Internets.