For day to day computing, my web browser is the only program I use. Email, documents, spreadsheets, calendar, photos, music, even LaTex documents; it’s all in the cloud these days. The advantages of this move to decentralized computing have been well documented and I won’t go into them here. However, what hasn’t evolved at the same rate is a method of keeping all these services accessible and organized.
Since 1993, bookmarks have been a feature of all major web browsers and the canonical way of keeping sites organized. This worked okay at a time when sites were static and could be easily categorized into subjects and folders. However, these days, one of the main issues I have is remembering what service I stored something on – ‘What was that cool new js library again? Did I star it on Github, or save it to Evernote or Pocket…’. ‘That online banking form we filled in for the club last year, did I save that to Dropbox, or is it loitering in my Gmail account somewhere? or was it my Uni email?’. I’m sure this sort of thought process must be familiar to anyone who is as immersed in web applications as I am, and bookmarks are no help for this sort of problem.
Luckily some other troubled souls realised this was a issue before I did and have created services to try and aggregate various cloud services:
- Jolidrive – Jolicloud is the new computing platform built around your life in the cloud. Jolicloud is the home for your most precious content.
- Kippt – Build your online library of amazing things.
- IFTT – Put the Internet to work for you.
- CloudKafe – Organize your cloud.
- Cloud Magic – A better life with every search.
These services all take a slightly different approach to addressing the problem, and each is a step in the right direction. Sadly, my experiences so far have been that they essentially try and do the jobs of the services they are aggregating, just in a less intuitive way or with fewer options. They’re also all relatively young and don’t come without the confidence of a well established company such as Google. For many users it can therefore be a tough sell to learn a whole new way of accessing their content, only for that service to potentially disappear the next day. And then there are the obligatory privacy concerns in giving one company the keys to all of your online information…
At the moment the best solution I’ve found has been to carefully select and limit the number of cloud services I subscribe to. One simple and worthwhile aggregation is to choose one email provider (in my case Gmail) and use it to pull (via POP3), email from all your other email accounts. Then at least all your emails are in one place!
Meanwhile, my search for the perfect tool continues.