Well, I finished my experiment living in the cloud. For the most part it's my personal information that I'm no longer keeping in the cloud. I'm going back to my desktop solutions iCal for calendar, Apple Mail for email, Word for word processing, Excel for spreadsheet, etc. I think that Cloud Living is great, don't get me wrong, it can definitely allow people that can't afford those applications and a computer. Think about a child can go to the Library to have access to a computer and then go to Google for Document creation and storage, Gmail for communication, even Google Talk. But for me I need more control over my documents and I want to be able to search for items on my laptop even when I'm not connected to the Internet. I've decided to continue using Google Documents for Blog posting. I really do like Documents editing features, and combining that with my laptop's Spelling & Grammar checker I have a powerful Blog Editor.
Now, I'm considering continuing to use Google Apps for School work via my school email account. But even for larger papers it might not be enough for me so I may have go back to Word for those as well. I'm still using Gmail, you can't do much better than their Spam controller, but accessing via the web maybe not be a good idea considering how information is sent over the
web. Though I've been able to find an
article to refute those claims in the YouTube video. But for me I still want better offline access to my documents. And to be able to search for information myself within my system.
So, good-bye to the Cloud but not entirely I still love using Google Reader as my feed reader. So there are some great apps that are created by Google so don't count them out. But there is something to what Richard Stallman said about vendor lock-in. Should we be locked in to a single vendor? That is the question.
