I have been a big proponent of “cloud” computing. Put everything in the cloud, let them worry about backups, service levels, and security. The added benefit is that it makes me somewhat platform independent.
But Yahoo! and to some extent Google, is killing it for me.
I love services like delicious and flickr, but with Yahoo! collapsing in on itself, I worry about continuing to use them. Google is only marginally better. Google killed off notebook and now wave. You can’t really trust these service will be there tomorrow. After reading an article yesterday (The Death of the RSS Reader) about how RSS readers are being replaced by Facebook and Twitter has me worried about the longevity of Google Reader, a service I live in. The article was spawned by the death of Bloglines, but it pointed out that the percent of visits to Google reader, as a percentage of all news and media site visits, was now down to 0.01%.
Perhaps it is time to move back to hosting all of my services myself. I regain a certain amount of flexibility if I do this, but I also gain a ton of extra work and maintenance.
Maybe Richard Stallman has been right all along when he said ”Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else’s Web server, you’re defenseless. You’re putty in the hands of whoever developed that software,”
How much is peace of mind worth?
