in my opinion - backed up 100% by myself and my dog - I think that cloud computing will become a totalitarian reality. Google and others are gobbling up the small workshops, as it were - Meebo for one - who said in on a web page that appeared when I went to log in "We are super excited to join the Google+ team and continue working on ways to make the web more social." and "Heads up, as part of our transition to Google, several other Meebo products have been retired." For "join" read 'gobbled up and spat out'. For "retired" read 'threat erased from the face of the Earth'.
https://www.meebo.com. You gotta love the spin; it made me just so 'super excited'.
But there is a more insidious and dark side to all this. Sure you have the people hollaring and shouting from the sidelines, as in this thread, as 'THE' cloud parades down the street; but that Cloud is the Pied Piper, The Land of Toys from Pinocchio and as every one follows it singing and dancing and praising the Great Cloud (whilst the ne'er-sayers are silenced by the Cloud Insurgency Police Unit) more and more personal information is being stored about you, your friends, their friends and their friends friends. You won't need to provide an alibi if you get nicked - for whatever reason - they will be able to place you in Tesco's at the time in question purchasing a tin of beans; which your phone will have spilled, cross linked to the store face-recognition-cloud-based survellance system that has, in an "Every Little Helps" helpful way, texted your phone to see if you would like to try some in-store 'Fresh baked' bread with your beans, now on offer in asile 9 - as it noted you had none in your basket.
You will not stop this march. Too much money hangs on it and fickle people are attracted to the iLife and will trample your body into the ground to get the latest 'New connectivity gadget you MUST have' if you stand in their way.
Is this doomsaying? Nope. I watch it happen everyday. Once you shuffled a handful of pictures of your holiday in your hand. Once you opened your wallet and took out a picture of your wife to show. Now the world and his wife can see it anytime anywhere on any number of devices and Google images will have scraped it up in their search for easy reference as soon as you touch-screen the 'shutter'.
Get everything online and out of your hands - yes it is, do you really think 'Delete' works - and 'they' have you. Don't toe the line, they will cut your access to your company records, deactivate your contact-less payment card, your phone and probably soon your car and gawd-knows what else.
1984 is alive and well and the irony is we built it ourselves.
