Internet Marketing Blog

Interacting in the Cloud

August 16, 2008 – 2:19 pm

“Working in the cloud” means you experience less data loss. Many applications in the cloud auto-save your work and offer ways to backup and or easily retrieve your data and documents. Storing your data in the cloud, like storing your videos on YouTube means you can save space on your local hard drive. Photobucket for example, helps you edit your videos online for free using Adobe ReMix aka, Adobe Premiere Express.

“Listening to music in the cloud” means there’s no need to store all the music locally either on your hard drive or a giant stack of cd-roms on your desk. Listening at Pandora or Last.fm means you can share music you like and listen to what others with similar tastes, recommend. Sharing is a large part of working and playing in the cloud.

A more interesting example is the blogging software I’m using now. Let me explain… Several plugins add functionality to the site. They get updated regularly by their programmers. When new versions of the plugin become available, a note appears next to the plugin in the admin section of the site. A link also appears so I can upgrade the plugin automatically. Clicking the “Upgrade Automatically” link is what triggers the magic. Although really cool, it’s not the fact that the plugin gets updated or that the process is basically a single click. The magic part is that the upgrade happens between two servers in the cloud. No files for the upgrade ever have to be downloaded or touch my local hard drive. The entire process is faster and potentially more secure. How is it more secure?

Most of the work we do in the cloud is on servers that are secured by professional security experts using best practices. All the usual caveats apply here but security and speed aren’t the only benefits to cloud computing.

Perhaps the best part of working in the cloud is always having access to your documents. This includes your photos and your videos regardless of what computer your using or where you’re using it. All you need is a broadband connection. A dial-up connection would be too slow and a pretty frustrating but that’s even improving with things like the new turbo/Google gears functionality built into this blog. But wait, there’s more!

• Tools like Zoho provide application suites that exist only in the cloud. Zoho offers the word processor, spreadsheet, presentation and meeting tools you may already be using locally.

• Acrobat.com offers similar features in a very different interface with a focus on Adobe Share and Adobe Live Connect, an online meeting tool.

• Google Apps have become very popular with documents, spreadsheets, presentations, email and mobile access.

YouTube, Flickr and dozens of other photo and video sharing services have been offering software as services for years now. Fotoflexer is a newer tool that allows you to edit a photo in the cloud. With many of the same features you’ll find in Adobe Photoshop, Fotoflexer edits your photo from your Flickr account and saves it back to your Flickr account without ever storing the image on your local machine.

The speed at which these programs work is incredible and in some instances (with broadband) nearly indiscernable from working on the file locally. Most folks may never even know they’re working in the cloud and there are limitations to what can be done with current bandwidth restrictions.

Those large print files and large videos will still need to be edited locally until our bandwidth needs are better met. More tools in the cloud are released daily. Give any of them a try and you’ll get a quick introduction to “interacting in the cloud.”

Additional Reading

Stateless computing to become core to cloud computing?

CNET News Daily Podcast: Tech giants head for the clouds

Watch who’s jumping on the Cloud bandwagon