Exstatica

Its interesting with the current Facebook outage, and the last year or so of various cloud services failing that we learn how much we rely on the internet. Just 5 years ago we didn’t have such a vested interest in communicating online. The shift of information has changed.

Think about just 5 years ago. Facebook was still closed to college students only, it had only been around since feb 2004. No Twitter, No Youtube. Social media as we new it didn’t exist. We relied heavily on email, and instant messaging.  Broadband was still expensive and slow. You were lucky to get 1.5/128 broadband. Things like Google Maps wasn’t even around in 2004. I’m sure 99% of us used Mapquest since it was the only real online map site.

With a sense of disconnect we continue hitting refresh in the hope that we will get a glimpse or a update from someone somewhere telling us that things will be ok, or what shoes you are wearing. Information that seems so silly yet so vital to our daily lives.

We then turn to other online media sites and flood them trying to get the word out to increase the buzz yet we all already know its down just from a twitter search. Which in itself creates a catch 22. If no one reports it, no one knows about it, if tens of thousands of people twitter it then it becomes an epidemic, and more wildly known. Even if the outage only last for a few minutes. The 5 minutes of downtime will circle the blog-o-sphere casting a much needed doubt in the reliability of the information we rely on.

We complain when there is an outage but build cloud based services because some niche needs to be filled on the internet for us to store our content. yet is still prone to failures as is with anything.  Whats the next move? Cloud based computing, lets remove local storage and put it on the cloud and build a computer around it. Don’t get me wrong, I think Chrome OS is great, and for someone who just needs to browse the web, check email, and look at pictures. My parents who are getting better at using the internet as long as I tell them what browsers to use, what services to use, and most of all a virus/spyware program that emails me. Plus I tell them they are not allowed to install anything unless they call me. Usually I have a better idea of what they are looking for than some program they don’t need.

What do I tell them if they are using Google Docs, and Gmail, and Wave and Google breakfast maker and the cloud goes down?

What if its like my father who would use it for work and handle customer tracking. What does he tell his clients when something goes down? What if a service goes out of business. I wonder if someone has built a graph of startups with cloud/remote storage and failures vs success. I don’t Google would fail, because they have some of the most amazing technology, and Microsoft is releasing Office Live which is a cloud based document center. Everything is just moving to the web. I don’t even think I could function without a computer for more than 2 weeks. Not only would my Email get backed up, my work would explode, I wouldn’t even know how to pay bills via snail mail let alone check my account balance without going to an atm. Even then I’d have no idea how to figure out how to get a balance. I mean I’m sure I could figure it out, but the browser and online banking is just so much easier.

I dunno, honestly its going to be very interesting to see where online media and social network takes us next. If the U.S. was the broadband leader and we all had 100mbit wireless internet I think the web would jump a few version numbers from 2.0 to 16.9 in a matter of months. Everyone wants instant content, and they want it now.

Search engines alone are getting crazy accurate. The next logical step for them is to plus directly into our brains and make our memory searchable. How awesome would that be? Google Brain Search.

Yes, If I could have a internet connection planted into my brain with audio and video playback, and just think what I want. I would rob you, get it implanted, go on every knowledge game show and then pay you back with my winnings. Hey I’m just saying…