null is not an object

With the recent demise of the micro blogging service Pownce, one has to wonder what happens to all their pownces (not sure what the equivalent of a tweet is in their world) and what if a tool that you actually depended on, like Twitter or GMail for example, were to shut down.

So the answer to the first question is that Pownce is letting you download all your pownces in some sort of format. I have not been able to get my data as of yet. That answer is pretty simple but it also begs the question of what will you do with that data. Competing micro blogging site Identi.ca has one idea and they are making an importer this week to get your pownces into Indenti.ca. This is a great move on their part of course since one can only assume they will get lots of new users this way.

Hot, nasty, bad ass data

Really what this comes down to is data. That brings to light a glaring hole in the shiny facade of Web 2.0, which is of course all about the data, and that hole is in the fact that sure you may technically own your data but if that latest Web 2.0 service goes away you are just stuck with a big text file that you may not even be able to do anything with - if that! Sure if Identi.ca were to go down then maybe Twitter would make an import feature (though I doubt they could scale for all those Identi.ca users that quickly and maybe Identi.ca can’t for Pownce?) or maybe you could take the Identi.ca code and deploy it yourself since it is after all open source - but in all seriousness who is going to do that? All you can really depend on is having a text file that you can grep to find that proudest of moments when Tim O’Reilly or similar linked to your blog post or something, which is now just a memory of the past.

Enough about micro blogging ’cause really who cares if your tweets or pownces are lost forever

What about other services that might go the way of the dodo in this recession? WordPress or, heaven forbid, GMail? When I tweeted that last night @sarahfelicity said

“@davejohnson don’t joke about such things!”

and I am sure many would agree.

I was probably a bit too flippant about the open source nature of Identi.ca in that WordPress is largeley the same, however, with WP you really do own your data (assuming you have downloaded the software and run it on your own server or someone does for you) as well as the hardware and software running your blog or website. You actually have access to the database storing your posts and comments and if your host were to go out of business you could find another one and migrate within 24 hours. I think that blogging software, maybe because it came out of the first dot com bubble, is a bit more safe or reliable than most Web 2.0 services because you can be in control of the data and, unlike Identi.ca, you can use that data without requiring the social networking effects of a micro blogging platform. That’s not to say it’s easy to convert a blog from WP to TypePad necessarily.

It’s about the data stupid

Finally, what happens if GMail goes down? For the most part, other than the usefulness of having a great online email provider, it simply doesn’t matter. You can access GMail through standards based protocols (POP and IMAP) and download all of your emails into your favourite desktop client where they can searched, replied to and so on. Your email is still useful if GMail goes away because it is all based on standards thus giving you the tools to reclaim your data. On the other hand your favourite whizzy Web 2.0 social networky application goes away, you are left in the cold.

I think this calls for new tools and protocols to help people take back real ownership of their data. Languages like Erlang and tools like CouchDB and Git seem particularly attractive.

The problem could get even worse when you start depending on companies like Amazon for all your cloud infrastructure. Amazon, like big banks, is not immune to changing economic conditions and moving to the cloud is not without a certain degree of risk. Amazon does a good job of minimizing that risk in EC2 by making those “boxes” as similar to what you get at any other host. Most Pownce users probably didn’t consider that risk when choosing that service nor others with Twitter.

I for one appreciate the fact that I can sleep easy knowing my email, despite being stored and used through an online web service, is safe and I have the ability to take it offline and use it whenever I want. Twitter not so much

Tags: cloud, opensource, pownce, saas, web2, Web2.0, webservices.

The discussion about what cloud computing is over at James’ blog is still raging.

While cloud computing is fascinating and a great opportunity for making IT more efficient in it’s own right. However, I have been thinking about smart grids a lot (and so have a lot of others like the better half of RedMonk and even The Google), which in short are electricity grids that have the ability to both provide and accept both electricity and information about the prices of said electricity all over the same wires making it possible for companies, government and people to choose to use electricity when it is cheap and generate it when it is expensive, thus, helping to reduce the amount of generation infrastructure required in a network to cover load peaks.

A classic example of this is when everyone in England gets home from work (or when the East Enders comes on the television) they turn on the kettle to make a cup of tea, the issue of only rich people being able to drink tea aside, resulting in a large spike in consumption that would (hopefully) be reduced by higher instantaneous pricing.

Today, users are charged for cloud computing in a predictable way at a rate of about $0.05 to $0.10 per hour depending on the provider. However, as we move to smart grids (and we already are with companies like Trilliant and GridPoint leading the way) we are going to see changes to the way cloud computing and most other service are billed for.

In the cloud all your data needs to be backed up and sitting on hard drives somewhere that likely need constant power (like Amazon S3) while other parts of the cloud are more temporal in nature like the load on a CPU (Amazone EC2). All this adds up to a more complex cost structure for the cloud provider.

At any rate, this post is not about smart grids but instead about smart clouds and the eventual reality where computing power has a temporal cost associated with. This will create a new niche for software that manager can manage CPU and storage load according to electricity price as well as new developer skill sets with a bigger focus on batch processing rather than real-time processing. I am just sort of thinking out loud here but think that the rules of the cloud (and development in general) will have to change if we move to a low carbon economy.

As I write this I can’t help but think about applying the real-time pricing concept of smart grids (and maybe smart clouds) to other areas of IT as well. For example, why not have dynamic pricing on bandwidth? When there is plenty of bandwidth in the middle of the night let me have 100Mbs and charge me the same price!

Not exactly sure where I am going with this but just formulating some ideas …

Tags: cloud, cloud computing, smart grid.

There has been a lot of talk these days about cloud computing with big announcements by by Google, Amazon and Microsoft practically daily.

Now add Aptana to that list. Not only do they make a great Ajax IDE in Aptana Studio but they have also been developing their own cloud solution. Kevin Hakman from Aptana puts it thusly:

Aptana Cloud is an elastic hosting and application lifecycle management service that’s integrated right into Aptana Studio and thus Eclipse. Basically it takes all the sys-admin work out of the process and gives developer and their teams instant scalable production environments that take only minutes to deploy to, and delivers hosted source control, staging environments, backups, monitoring, reports, stats, etc… to streamline the entire app lifecycle – even before you go live. (and it costs just $0.04 cents an hour to get started, except there’s also a free trial promotion for a limited time too).

Andre and I recorded a video with Kevin back at JavaOne where Kevin gave the world it’s first peak at Aptana Cloud so it is cool to see it get to the 1.0 release!

Check out this blog post form Aptana for a little more info about it.

Tags: aptana, cloud, RIA.