My understanding of cloud computing is that software, data and resources are taken away from the desktop and hosted by a third party provider. The resources are then provided as a service to the end user, and can be accessed by any device with an internet connection. We don’t have to worry about it working or being compatible, because it just works. It’s called the cloud computing because we are obscured from what actually happens on the third party’s side by a “cloud” or the internet.

Software as a Service

There are services already out there based on the cloud architecture, Google for example provides Goggle Docs that you can access and edit on any device with an internet connection. This is known as Software as a Service (SaaS), saas is basically a web based application that you don’t need to install to be able to run. The benefit of this is that you don’t need to worry about having the correct version installed or correct patches running on all of your machines. It also means that cost is spread throughout the lifetime of you using the product, instead of having to purchase the software upfront you are charged based on how much you use it.

Hardware as a Service

There is also Hardware as a Service or (Haas), haas again charges you only for when you use the hardware resources. This saves businesses and users having huge capital costs for hardware they are going to be using some of the time. Amazon already provides this service calling it Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), charging users by how much they use per hour.

But why would someone use this service?

My answer is why not, cloud computing is also commonly known as utility computing which helps us understand it more. The best analogy I can think of is back when electricity was first becoming available you needed to invest in a generator to be able to have electricity, then an infrastructure was built to allow us to build power stations so electricity was available to anyone without huge capital costs to get it.

The same is for computers, we have been investing lots of money for better and faster hardware but now that we have an infrastructure, the internet, we can utilise it so we don’t have to purchase lots of hardware and let the cloud do all of the processing for us.

Cloud computing although already around us is in its early phase and won’t go mainstream for some time yet there are lots of things to be learnt and compatibility issues sorted. But I wouldn’t dismiss it as a service just yet especially for file sharing side of things.

More Info

Want more information about cloud computing? Check out the links below

• Wikipedia on Cloud Computing
• Wikipedia on Hardware as a Service
• Wikipedia on Software as a Service

I think this post is therapy for me than anything else, but I thought I’d make this clear before I go on. I’m a facebook user who has never had an active myspace profile for the many reasons I list below.

Uniform Design

For starters every single myspace profile looks like it’s from the 90’s with terrible design and layout, it’s like all of the users are shouting out “look at me I’m on the internet”. The glittery text and thousands of images bloating the page not only makes it longer to load but also is a strain on my poor eyes.

Facebook on the other hand has gone in a completely different direction and made all profiles uniform, with it being designed by a professional designer it actually looks good. With the new layout Facebook have gone even further in this direction by removing all the cluttering apps from the users profile page and put them on a separate tab, meaning everything is easy to find. If I want to find out some information about a contact on Facebook I just have to click the “Info” tab and everything is there where as on Myspace I’ve got to go on a hunt.

Auto Playing Music

Music is one of the things I’ve always hated about Myspace, auto playing music is very 90’s. When I want to listen to music I make a conscious decision to do so, instead I have to quickly find the media player that is responsible and pause it or simply turn down my speakers, both being highly inconvenient.

Friends Feeds

Facebook lets you keep up to date with your friends very easily, the feed system is my favourite feature putting all of my friends activities on one page so I don’t have to visit everyone’s profile to find out what’s going on with them. Not only that but I can choose to find out more about certain people, ie my friends and less about others ie my contacts. Not only is this information displayed on one page it is also syndicated via RSS so I can have all my friends’ status’s update right on my desktop.

Gripes with Facebook

As you might be able to tell I do quite like facebook as a tool for keeping up to date on what my friends are doing, but I do have a few gripes with it namely the requests feature. I hate being mass spammed with messages to join a group that I have no interest in what so ever. I use the feed for finding interesting groups that my friends have recently joined.

There also seems to be a lot of complaint about the new Facebook layout, I’m glad Facebook is holding their ground on this and are not going to be switching back. My message to any facebook user who is complaining is that I would like you to read the facebook 10 commandments and take note of number 10.