The Social Cloud
Bringing together social media and cloud computing
Every day I download the news on my smart phone using an RSS newsfeed. I talk to my friends using Facebook and Twitter, promote my work through LinkedIn, watch videos on the BBC iPlayer and YouTube, and share photos through Flickr. Instead of storing my data on my desktop I use the cloud for my bookmarks, photographs and information. Delicious, Flickr and Twine are my bookmarklets to share my information. Using an iPod Touch I check the television schedules and record my favourite shows to watch later. During the day I check my emails, share documents and comments on movies, books and the like. The cloud has become our social sphere.
The Social Cloud has changed the paradigm of the way we used to connect to the world through email and messaging. It is turning upside the newspaper world for our daily news feed. It is challenging email, email and IM for contacting friends, and the desktop for storing information.
The world is changing at an increasingly rapid pace. Twitter may have emerged as the zeitgeist for the older age group who have left Facebook and MySpace to the younger generation (Facebook has responded by including its own news feed prominently on the profile page) but it has proven to be more than just an update to what you are up to; it is surpassing RSS as the newsfeed of choice.
The Social Cloud is just as much about your professional and personal online personas. Either way, we will increasingly trade our privacy for attention. Walled communities of Facebook will face and crumble to pressure from open societies such as Twitter. It didn't work for Friends Reunited. Tagging will become the intelligent way forward for identities as the semantic web matures through Web 3.0.
Cloud computing has primarily grownt through business propositions delivering rapidly scalable remote computing at cost-effective rates e.g. Amazon's EC2 effectively reducing the costs of enterprise computing. The laptop acts a terminal through which the user can from anywhere access and manage software (through the SAAS service as a software model) with an unlimited server resource that can expand to meet their needs. This proposition is now rapidly expanding into the consumer market through the freemium model - a free basic resource expandable through a premium pay service.
A key barrier for original growth of email was security. Whilst this fear was mostly unfounded and related to concerns around new untried technology it may yet rear its ugly head for real as the government (mis)uses its anti-terrorism legislation to monitor our messaging. Blogging attracted a whole new generation going beyond the email as newsletter to an open world. This new open sharing of content shocked many with its uninhibited and often inane sharing. Then came the networks such as MySpace which have not convinced an older generation of their value due to privacy concerns despite hiding behind a login. Twitter has attracted a whole new generation who have moved on from building a life resume to focusing on the lifestream. Again, there is a generation that regard this open outpouring as unsafe. There are many contenders to the throne as we gradually move to the next phenomenom being the mobile network. Goojet has tried, Facebook has its iPhone version. As the smartphone becomes simpler to use and more ubiquitous the social cloud will become a mobile social cloud linked to location apps - the Google Android has already kickstarted this.
But cloud computing has its weaknesses - security and downtime to name a couple. The recent Gmail fiasco highlights the crucial problem of dependency for businesses never mind regular users of network online apps. Google, amongst others is trying to alleviate this through offline "gears" operation. Facebook's recent attempts to unilaterally tighten up its EULA agreement with its million's of users has emphasised how much users regard their data as exactly that, irrespective of what the EULA may state.
In TechCrunch's interview with Google’s Kevin Marks, Developer Advocate for OpenSocial at Google, described the future for the social cloud as 'everything on the web will become more social, augmenting the many things you already do on the web. Whether you’re shopping, deciding what to read, or researching a topic, knowing what your friends, or family, or the people you respect think about that product, book, or source of information is a vital part of the web.'
The next generation of social cloud apps will not be hosted and executed in a walled garden environment but accessible as defined by the user. For instance, email like Gmail will evolve into Google Wave and be partly hosted in a cloud, but also hosted on personal computers. Use of P2P can minimise failwhale issues. Portability across apps and ubiquity through devices will drive innovation and success. July 2009