The Dark Side of Cloud Computing

20Oct/090

The Dark Side of Cloud Computing

I've always been a big fan of the Cloud Computing concept. The advantages of agility, cost and scalability are overwhelmingly appealing to both end users and IT professionals. Amazon has been one of the leaders in translating the concept / theory into practice with their AWS service. Many of today's successful Web 2.0 and social web sites have leveraged cloud computing to their advantage and utilize the AWS service.

However, there's a dark side to cloud computing ...

This past week customers with a Sidekick device on the T-Mobile network lost all their data when the network servers owned and managed by Microsoft went down. There's now a class-action suit pending. Just when all seemed lost, today customers were luckily informed by Microsoft that their contacts lists could be recovered.

Google has recently had access issues for their GMail service. Today people are having issues accessing Flickr, Facebook and Twitter.

As more and more of our personal and corporate data moves out to the cloud we should all be concerned with the following:

How secure is it?
How accessible will it be if/when there's a major event?

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20Oct/092

I’m tweeting more (a lot more) and blogging less (not at all) … Why?

I started my personal blog in late 2005. In almost four years, I've only written 158 blog posts. I joined Twitter on October 21, 2007. In two years I've tweeted 2,868 times! 158 blog posts in four years vs. 2,868 tweets in two years. That's a 36:1 ratio between Twitter and this blog.

WOW!

I know this isn't really a valid comparison. A single 140 character tweet (or retweet) that takes a few seconds to create can't really be compared to a detailed blog post that can take several hours to write and edit.

So, what measure of value can I use as a valid comparison?

How about engagement / dialog?

When I look at two of the most successful posts I've written here and here (measured by comments and references made to them by other people out in the blogosphere), I feel that I contributed something of value to the community. Do my tweets contribute any value? I guess they must to the 1,200 or so people who follow me on Twitter.

Is this a cop-out? Am I just too lazy to write more on the blog?

After some soul-searching it's clear that I love the sense of community on Twitter and the sense that I'm plugged into the "flow" or the stream. My blog is out on the periphery and it only gets between 0 and 100 visits a day according to Google Analytics.

So what do you think? Does this blog add any value? Should I shut it down? Or invest more time and energy to make it something of more value? Your thoughts and comments would be greatly appreciated.