GDrive

Whoa!  Look at this  and that and this, too.  The GDrive.  Long rumored, it looks like this is pretty close.  Along with stories that GMail is getting the Gears treatment  and so will be available off-line - with automatic syncing - it looks like maybe Google is up to something.

It's an explosion.  I can't even keep track of how many times they reference the Cloud.  But it looks like - pressured by whatever Microsoft's doing with Windows Live and Apple's divided MobileMe and iWork - the Big G is looking to jump into the game.  And this might bring greater integration between the various Google apps.  I'll believe it when I see it, but it's looking like this stuff is happening fast.  

As a quick observation, I think this is great, despite my investment in Box.net.  Hopefully, they'll also figure out a way to let me access the documents and files - and edit them - via iPhone, as well.....  

GMail

Well, I had decided that my first real blog entry on Cloud details would be on GMail, but I want to write about something else Cloud related. So, in keeping with the original spirit, here are my thoughts about GMail.

One of the first appearances of the Cloud is really in the host of email programs that sprang up in the late 90s, with Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail being the biggest and best examples. Prior to that, your email client was just another program on your desktop, most likely Outlook. You had to configure it to hit a mail server somewhere, which was a rather painful experience of religiously following a list of arcane instructions dotted with references to smtp and mail servers, and where things would mysteriously go wrong. Very painful.

The first I became aware of an alternative was when some of the ISPs and hosting services I tapped into started allowing webmail - basically a website that you could call up anywhere and tap into your email account. Most of them were pretty plain and didn't work all too well. And they didn't get around the basic problem of sucking down your emails onto your desktop; if you were at work and wanted to look up a personal email you had gotten three months ago - sorry, no go; you had to be at your home desktop to do that.

But Hotmail and Yahoo! started changing the game. The web interface for both of them was fast, appealing, and - best of all - you could access your email from anywhere you had an Internet connection. Not a lot of capacity, but you could store them in folders, keep them around for awhile, search through them, etc. As internet connectivity became ubiquitous, these gained in popularity; by the mid-2000s, if you were on a computer, you were connected - and it didn't make sense to deal with Microsoft's Outlook to lock all of your email in one place.

Cloud-wise, there's not a lot of difference between Yahoo!, Hotmail, and GMail. And I'll confess - I switched from using both Yahoo! (for most of my mail) and Hotmail (for really personal mail) a few years ago. So Yahoo! and Hotmail may have matured some in the meantime. I, however, am hooked on GMail - for the way it tackles the Cloud.

Good Stuff

So, what's so good about GMail, and why won't I ever consider going back? Initially, I believe I got hooked because of the storage - which at the time was a robust 1G and then 2G and the promise that you would never have to throw anything away. It pretty much kicked everyone's ass at the time. In response, it seems as though Yahoo! created unlimited email storage, and Hotmail upped their limit to 5G, and GMail responded with 6G for everyone "and counting." I, however, bought space a couple of years ago for Picasa, with the result that the extra Google storage didn't apply just to Picasa, but also other Google apps - notably GMail. So, let's see.... I currently have 1.4G in GMail (and I've been keeping damn near all my email for something like three or four years now), which is 8% of my 17.1G capacity - for which I pay like $5 a year or something.

But storage was just "the hook." The reasons I stay or much greater.

Threading

Threading is the single biggest reason to stay with GMail, because GMail's threading kicks everyone's butt. Outlook says it has threading, but when I tried Outlook 2003 a few years ago, it was so horrible as to not really qualify as threading. Thunderbird has threading, but.... it just wasn't as good. It looks like Yahoo! and Hotmail still don't have threading.....

What is threading? Well, you know the situation where you send three friends an email (Subject: What's Uuuuupppp???) asking what they want to do this weekend. Friend A replies back to you that they want to go out drinking Friday. You reply back that Friday you have to shave the cats, but your band-aided and iodined self should be up for heading out around 9:00 or so. Friend B laughs at the joke. Friend X, who you haven't seen in year's, sends you an email (Subject: Long time, no ears) to check and see how you're doing. Friend C says they can't do Friday night; have fun; but they're going to see a movie on Saturday - who's up for tagging along. Friend B says they'd love to go. Business Associate W asks when you're going to be done reviewing that document he sent (Subject: Re: Document for your review). You gently remind Friend B that they haven't committed to the pub crawl Friday night. Friend D chirps in that they have strep, so won't be doing anything.

How that whole series of events is translated is vastly different in GMail versus just about everyone else. Regular email programs/services just spit out one email after the other, and often place your replies in the Sent folder.

Friend D; Re: What's Uuuuupppp???

Business Associate W; Re: Document for your review

Friend B; Re: What's Uuuuupppp???

Friend C; Re: What's Uuuuupppp???

Friend X; Long time, no ears

Friend B; Re: What's Uuuuupppp???

Friend A; Re: What's Uuuuupppp???

7 emails, not including the three emails that you sent which are sitting in the Sent Mail box/folder. It takes up a lot of screen real estate, and jumbles these things all together.

GMail attacks the problem completely differently:

me, Friend A, Friend B, Friend C, Friend D; What's Uuuuupppp???

Business Associate W, me; Re: Document for your review

Friend X; Long time, no ears

If you were to open that first email, you'd see the whole threaded email conversation, your original email, and the other 7 subsequent replies to it, including your replies, in chronological order; the ones you've read would be collapsed into just the author and first line. Along with Associate W's recent email, their initial email from three weeks ago floats up to the top, along with your initial reply asking for more info - which they never got back to you. It works very much like an internet forum thread, but even better.

Occasionally - and seemingly only from one particular person whose emails are delivered through a Yahoo! group - the threading gets a little screwed up. But by and large, this just works. It's revolutionary; and once you try it, you won't be able to go back to using normal email. It's painful for me to use the iPhone's mail app hooked to GMail. I use it, mostly because GMail's iPhone webapp version isn't great, either - but boy do I miss the full-on GMail experience, and for a lot of email processing, I need to be at a full-blown browser.

Labels

The second revolutionary email innovation is GMail's use of labels rather than folders. Labels are a much more fluid, better way to work than folders. I can tag an email thread (sorry, not individual emails) with one or two or several different labels. If my wife sends me something, it gets tagged with 'Beth.' If she's talking about something to do with the house, I will also tag it 'House'. And if it happens to be an email asking our family to come paint the house, I'll maybe label it 'Family' as well.

Why is this important? Well, it gives me a really handy way to look up those emails later. I know there was an email thread that was sent out about painting the house, so I look at emails with the House label. Generally, you can design a label system that's fine-grained enough to narrow your search, so it makes it relatively easy to find, and voila - because of threading, I have the original email and all the replies from everybody making excuses as to why they can't be there.

But isn't that just like folders, you ask? No, and the reason is - I can put multiple tags on the thread. That way I can go searching for it from different angles. Maybe I just remember that Beth wrote the initial email, so I can look for all those emails tagged Beth. Or maybe I remember that I asked my family, so I look up family. You can't do that with folders without making lots of copies all over the place. And how do you update all those copies when people email you back? Not to mention the fact that all subsequent replies get separated from their antecedents, and you have to file each and every one; I label the thread, and every email in that thread gets pulled together and labeled the same. Folders also tend to be for storage: you move an email into a folder, and out of your inbox. Not so in GMail; I can label an email and keep it in my inbox for further action.

Additionally, you can star email threads - which is really just a very specialized label. Don't remember a damned thing about the email other than you had to do something with it? Look under Starred. And with the newest Google Labs innovations, you can star it with different symbols. I label emails with some neat information that I'll want to reference later with a blue 'i' "star." One click - and there it is.

Search

What would a Google service be without Search? And the GMail search works very well. As initially touted, GMail allowed you to "never throw anything away." That gets you a lot of emails very fast, and it would be a problem if Google wasn't synonymous with Search.

Case in point. Last night there was a horrible ice storm. We don't get these days too often here in the Mid-Atlantic, and when we do - well, I never know where to look to find out if there's a delay or cancellation or what. Unfortunately, this morning, I managed to lock myself out of my email and Citrix accounts, so I couldn't find the policy or the number to call to figure out whether we had work. I made it into work to find that my boss had emailed the inclement weather policy - with the weather line number - at about 6:30 AM. Which of course I couldn't get to because I was closed out of work email. SO.... I forwarded the email to my GMail account, tagged it with my 'Work' label, and archived it. In two years when we have another ice storm that threatens to shut down the city, I can easily type in the search box 'inclement weather' or 'weather policy' or even just 'weather' and I should have a much reduced list of emails to sort through. (8 emails show up in the Search of 'inclement weather' - including the email I want and this draft; I can see the message I sent out 2 and half years ago explaining what we would do for my outdoor wedding in case of inclement weather....)

It's a powerful way to find emails, and so easy that you do it without even thinking about it.

Archive

The amount of storage space, use of labels, and great Search functionality allow you to archive emails. Press the button and they zip to a place out of your way. You access them by calling up their labels or searching. In essence, this is not that different from filing in a folder, but it feels different - it's a different way of thinking about it. It essentially separates categorizing an email from filing it away, so you can categorize an email the first time you read it, and hold it in the inbox or star it for later action. Later replies are also tagged with the same label. When you're done with the email - then you file it, not exactly getting rid of it - but getting it out of your sight.

Spam & other nasties

Spam sucks. But GMail has the best spam filters I have seen. Very little gets through. I currently have 588 spam messages isolated, with at least 150 in the last week. And I haven't seen one of them. Every once in awhile there will be a spate of spam that creeps through. I mark it as spam, and after a day or two the epidemic goes away. I seriously do not worry about spam, and I never have to configure anti-spam software on my computer. Additionally, GMail does a good job of catching and alerting you to phishing emails. Viruses? I don't worry about anti-virus software on my email (which is admittedly true of most on-line email services), either, because GMail gets rid of that, too. (I do have it on my computer.)

Integration with other services

Google isn't alone; I understand that Yahoo! has a particularly strong calendar, contacts, and RSS. And there are other surprisingly robust application suites out there - like Zoho, which I've used with my Box.net account (more on that one day). There are others out there that a Google search will turn up - things like 37Signals' BaseCamp and Backpack, or Scrybe. Even aspects of Apple's iWork and MobileMe, and Microsoft's Windows Live. Another that I came at by shank's corners is Zenbe - again, more on that soon.

But Google's "suite" of apps is nice. The contacts is really just an add on to GMail, and while it has made some strides, is still not the most robust out there, but it works (and I have it synching with my iPhone now). Google has a very nice integration with Google Chat - which pops up in the corner; conversations are archived and searchable like email.

There is some nice integration with Google Calendar (GCal) and Google Docs. GCal is a very nice program - I love it almost as much as GMail, but that's another post. And there are a couple of points of integration between the two. First, if someone sends you an email with date and time information, GMail makes an attempt to create an event out of it. Look over on the right, and there's a link to "Add to calendar." It's not great, and could use some tweaking - a recent "Add to calendar" link picked out a reasonable event title and got the date right, but chose the End Date listed in the email as the start date.

While composing an email you can add an event invitation, as well. And Google has released a nice little Lab add-on that gives you a peek at your calendar. You can configure it to show a mini-calendar, display one or more of your GCal calendars, and can do a quick add of an event from it. Quite handy.

As for Google Docs, there's a similar Lab widget, and if you get a spreadsheet or document or presentation as an email attachment, you are given the option to display (and save) the file in Google Docs.

A series of links at the top of the page allows you to launch GCal, Google Docs, Picasa (Photos), Google Reader, and additional programs (such as a To Do list, through a Lab add-on). Not much of an integration, and it could be more, such as a more seamless way to start a doc in GMail, import a picture from Picasa, save it to Google Docs, and ultimately publish to your Blogger blog. There are Firefox plug ins that allow you to do this - so maybe it's not too far off. Some of this stuff you can do thanks to a Labs add-on (to start a Doc from an email conversation), and Docs now allows you to publish directly to your blog. But it all has the feel of being patched together, not seamless.

Bad Stuff

But, there's some trade off.

Security

The Search capabilities create a problem. If Google indexes your emails so you can find stuff easily, it means anybody can find stuff easily. I personally find this a little overblown. Yahoo! and Hotmail also have this information indexed so it can be readily accessed; the difference is Google does it better. If you have security issues, well, perhaps you shouldn't use Google's services. But as I've mentioned earlier, perhaps you shouldn't use the Cloud at all, including Yahoo! or Hotmail.

Not as tight as it could be

There's a lot of potential here, but it's not fully realized. The bit of research I've done suggests Yahoo! is doing a lot of this stuff, as well; in several cases, doing it better. (Yahoo! bought, within the last year or so, a company called Zimbra that appears to do many of the same things as Google, but as a commercial enterprise product.) Google contacts are a little light. Google has yet to fold Picasa into the group as well as they have Blogger - and even that is a bit of an afterthought (as Lab add-ons, not as a full-blown feature of GMail.) Zenbe comes close to providing an integrated solution, but has some other problems. But, really, not many people are doing as much as Google in this area, and no one is doing it better or doing more.

GMail and the Cloud

So, bottom line, how is this the first really meaty piece of my Cloud investigation?

Gmail is the base of operations

It's my home in the Cloud, more or less. Now, I'm not saying everything is right there. But GMail is where I start every day, and more than likely where I end every day. The first consideration for any new service is, "How well will it integrate with my GMail?" If I can get something that leverages my GMail account, it's as near to in as it can be; if it would replace GMail - well, it's pretty much out. (Xobni held my attention for a little while, until it I realized that it did some similar things to GMail, and some things I'd like to see GMail adopt. But to get that functionality, I had to pass GMail through Outlook, and I just wasn't that into it.) Again, Zenbe gets tantalizingly close to providing an email platform that serves as a home for a variety of other applications, but falls a little short. GMail, on the other hand, supplies great email features and it seems to be gaining extensions and add-ons that allow me to do lots of other stuff, too.

GMail is a good example of Cloud computing

First, all my emails are sitting in the Cloud. I can access them through my computer at work, I can access them through my computer at home, I can access them at the library, on my friend's computer. I can get them on my iPhone.... And I'm not syncing (which I sort of consider cheating). They are stored on a server that I will never see.

And, likewise, the application itself is stored on and operates from a server I will never see. This has implications, as well. Google gets some stick for being in "constant beta," but that's sort of the hallmark of Cloud computing. Commercial Project Portfolio Management packages that are marketing themselves as Software as a Service (i.e., Cloud-based) tout the fact that features - while still dutifully tested - are rolled out as they are developed, and seamlessly. No reinstallations, no upgrades to download and install, the user never recognizes a thing, other than a "New Features!" link.

What GMail doesn't have - and most Web 2.0 services do - is collaboration. But that's as you would expect it; I don't want to share my email with people (that I know). (Though Zenbe allows for email collaboration in a rather interesting way.) Email "collaboration" takes the form of forwarding and replying; and in a way, GMail handles this better than most through its threading. At least, it's easier for you to figure out what's going on. But additionally, the other parts of the Google cloud - GCal, Google Docs, Picasa - do allow for a rather robust collaboration.

So, GMail. It's good. The benefits - especially threading and labeling - far outweigh the security concerns, the underdeveloped add-ons, and the lack of integration (that no one else does any better.) Would I like it to be able to do some of the things that Zenbe or Xobni can do? Sure - they both have some nice features: ZenbePages, a separate tab that collects your attachments, analytics.... But they lack the basic functionality, and - dare I say it - "just works"-ability of GMail.

The Cloud - Part 2

Yeah!  Like a week after I wrote the beginnings of my opus on Cloud computing, Steve Ballmer of Microsoft delivers the opening keynote for CES 2009. 

Why is this so cool?

As I said previously, this whole Cloud thing has been common knowledge to techsters for the last few years.  We've seen it coming (thanks largely to Google), we've been using these services on PCs with our browsers, and we've been trying out the first hardware forays into the Wild Blue Yonder.  But unless I miss my mark here, Cloud computing isn't exactly a household concept quite yet.

I just checked - the recent Macworld keynote delivered by Phil Schiller makes no mention of the word Cloud.  It skirts the issue - you can make documents in iLife and iWork and then get them to your iPhone.  And you can "share" documents that you make in iWork to iWork.com where others can take a look at them.  Then, of course, there's MobileMe which syncs calendar, email, and contact information between your PC, iPhone, and Mac through the Cloud.  (They mentioned that at the WWDC last year.)  I don't know how they both work, exactly; but already I see a split between MobileMe and iWork.com; one is for one type of information, one is for another.

Ballmer mentions the Cloud twice (at 6:45 and 7:39) to announce that Windows will be the lynchpin that ties it all together, and that families will be connected with "cloud-based entertainment content."  A chunk of this seems to be provided by the Windows Live service - which near as I can figure brings Hotmail, on-line storage, "People" (contacts?), Messenger, and Photos together and allows you to use them via your PC or phone.

Neither of these is exciting.  Google has been doing this for awhile now - with GMail (and its built-in contacts) as the mother ship - which nicely integrates with GTalk, a pretty decent integration with GCal, GDocs (which has some integration), Picasa (for photos), and Blogger.  Additionally, Google has started making forays into bookmark management (which is somehow mysteriously tied to GNotes) and at least half-hearted attempts at a slew of other things, like web authoring, social networking, and a wikipedia.  Oh, and a browser.

And there are dozens of other services that do things like this.  Box.net , for example, fills Google's lack of accessible on-line disk space, and hooks to a bunch of services, including Google and Zoho.com - which is a Cloud-based service allowing for storage and editing of documents and spreadsheets over the net and a whole lot more.

And indeed, Microsoft and Apple have some catching up to do.  I won't totally sell them short, but I will say - I'm not sure they can do it.  Microsoft has Windows, and all accounts are Windows 7 is going to be good.  Huge market-share there.  Apple is beloved by a large section of the tech buying public, as well - and has a reputation for just making stuff that is simple and elegant and just works.  But Google alone has a huge lead on them.  (I felt a little bad because Schiller was going on and on about how iPhoto can recognize faces - when this is technology Picasa has had out for the last 4 months or so.)  And both of them still miss the point somewhat.  I think the split between MobileMe and iWork.com is pretty big.  And note that this is syncing - the file resides on multiple devices and it pushes changes to the Cloud, Mac, iPhone (only), and PC that you have registered.  Windows Live doesn't even appear to try to address the problem of on-line document editing, but potentially comes closer to allowing a large array of devices (home PC, work PC, XBox, WinMo phones, and anything with a browser) to access content.  (I say potentially because I am disturbed by references to Windows Live as opposed to XBox Live - I'm not sure how well the two are integrated.)

But what's exciting about these keynotes is that "the Cloud" is about to launch into the public consciousness.  2009 will be the Year of the Cloud.  Both Apple and Microsofts efforts - as late to the game as they are - are the mainstreaming of a current that has been developing the last couple of years.  It's going to be a cool year.

Life in the Cloud

I've been threatening this topic for awhile, dancing around it, sizing it up....  Started a couple of times and I just couldn't get my thoughts on to paper.  But it's been getting increasingly difficult to think about this stuff without taking some sort of white paper approach to this, so here goes another stab.

One of the greatest things about the modern internet is the emergence of "the Cloud."  The movement towards Cloud Computing has been growing for some time, but - looking back now - it seems like it really made its emergence in 2008.

For those of you puzzling over what I'm talking about, "the Cloud" is really just the internet, so named because on network diagrams, connections to the internet are shown as a cloud. For some time the Internet has been used to serve information to each other.  Email is one such application: a user at a terminal on the left side of the picture above shoots a chunk of information to a user on the right side of the image.  Internet browsing is another.  A user on the right side sends a request for information to a computer on the left hand side, and that computer returns a chunk of information that the right-hand computer can composite into a web page.

Typically, we install programs on our computers and use those programs to write a letter on Word, crunch numbers in Excel, watch a movie or listen to a song in Windows Media Player or iTunes, play games, etc.  The program and the data reside on our hard drives and use our hardware; in some cases the application might go out to the Internet to grab some information, but all the processing was done locally.    But in the last couple of years, the Internet has seen the steady growth of Web 2.0 applications, where the program no longer resides on our computer.  Instead of making a request to a computer across the network for a static blob of information to be composited as a page, we are now able to make a request of a computer on the other side of the network and have that computer do something for us.  The code and the processing power resides on the other side of the Cloud.  This is great for software companies for a variety of reasons.  Delivery is made a lot easier - no CDs to burn, manuals to be printed, blister packs to prepare, shipments to be made; no big box store is needed to do the actual distribution, idiot end users who may do funky things with their install won't be calling tech support....  It also means that the software company can make updates a lot easier and get them out a lot easier and keep everyone on the same set of code. In fact because you control the environment, you can ignore many of the problems of developing for multiple platforms.  As long as they can access your server via the Internet through one of the handful of standardized browser's - your computers do the heavy lifting in whatever language you want; it's up to the client's browser to composite the standardized blob you send them back. And you don't have to worry about bootleggers copying disks and sending it to all of their friends, or their two laptops and desktop computer.  

And not only is the program code on a server sitting across the internet, but the data for that program is also likely sitting "in the Cloud."  The letter you typed, the numbers you crunched, the photos you uploaded and manipulated aren't on the computer you used, but are sitting on another computer linked to the computer providing the code.  And that seems a little weird - your stuff, your information isn't on some medium that you own or control.  It's on a computer many hundreds or thousands of miles from you, jumbled together with the data from a bunch of other people - but still, almost instantaneously available to you.

There are several implications to this arrangement.  One, it can be a bit of a security problem.  If you don't control your data, how can you protect it against being accessed by others, or used without your permission?  Two, if you need access to the Internet in order to retrieve your data, what happens when you lose connection to the Internet, or the server the data is on loses connection to the Internet, or the company administering the server goes out of business?  

In some ways, these problems aren't really all that different from problems that exist in the "real world" side of computing.  If all of your data is on your laptop and you don't have access to your computer - you don't have access to your data.  And what happens if you out and out lose your computer or get it stolen or the computer crashes?  Unless you've back up regularly - and which of us is confident that our backup protocol is airtight? - the chances are you are going to lose something.  And in terms of security, it is not a difficult thing to smash and grab a laptop and thus gain access to a whole bunch of personal information. 

In some ways, Cloud computing is a little more secure and stable.  The fail-safe abilities that these companies have is impressive; strong backup protocols, redundant servers, 24 hour maintenance.  If their hard drive crashes, it's already been backed up and was probably replicated on another server anyways.  You can't smash and grab these places - your data is generally split up and sent all over the place - so it's not in one easy location for a thief to access, and you need to have a password in order to get to the data.  I mean, given enough desire and know-how, a thief can capture your password and gain access - but it takes a lot more effort to do that than to break your window, grab your computer, and run out of the house.

It's my belief, however, that the big benefit of Cloud computing far outweighs the potential problems, and that's access.  It's a security risk (less of a problem and more of something that needs to be provided for), but because your data is distinct from your computer, you can get at it from many different places, computers, and platforms.  At work?  You can likely use work's internet connection to get to your data.  At a friend's house - ask for a quick couple of minutes on their computer.  On vacation - you wouldn't believe the number of internet cafes and business centers that are in major metropolitan areas.  On the go - most cell phones these days can access the data just as easily.

A case in point of one of the most popular Web 2.0, cloud-based applications: GMail.  Google controls GMail's code base, and they've adopted a little gimmick by having it in constant beta.  In other words, they can - and will - release features willy nilly, as they come available, rather than waiting for a big release.  Your emails reside on a Google server - or rather, several servers spread throughout the country.  I can access my email at work, at home on the HP media center, at Panera on my laptop, on my friend's Mac, on my Verizon cell phone, on my old Dell Axim PDA, on the old WinCE or 286 machines at the theater, on my iPhone, on my Linux-based N800.....  All I need is a modern browser and my user information.  As long as I keep my password secure, and Google upholds their end of the security bargain, it's pretty tough for anyone other than me to break into my source.  And I never need to worry about my laptop flaming out (as it did a few years ago) and losing access to everything everyone had written me.

The list of applications is surprisingly large, and as I mentioned earlier has been growing for the last few years.  Google has a bunch of them: GMail, CCal, Picasa, Google Docs, Google bookmarks, etc.  But there are lots of other applications out there.  There are services such as Jott - which transcribes vocal notes you make on a cell phone and turns them into electronic notes, reminders, to do items, and texts.  Or Evernote - which does about the same thing with pictures.  In fact, many banking applications use the same principals: you interact with password protected financial information from your bank, on a variety of platforms, where you can look up information, contact a representative, make financial transactions, view and report on transactions, etc.

So, that's cloud computing in a nutshell.  But there's so much more to it than just that.  My plan is to continue to revisit this topic and talk about some of the applications and services I'm using.  So stay tuned....