Cloud Malaise

So, I’ve noticed recently I’ve been feeling uneasy about the cloud. I think it stems from several factors.

The dissolution of Delicious.com.
The realization that the majority of traffic on the web goes to google, facebook, and twitter. And then realizing my patterns are the same.
Getting locked out of my google account for a few hours and then realizing how dependent I was on it.
Twitter going from open-source loving entity to starting to close access to its data.
The enormity of Facebook and its walled data, reminiscent of AOL’s walled garden.

These things led me to look at how I was using not just the cloud itself, but services provided by humongous corporations. Corporations that lock up my data, use it for data mining or even lose my data.

What I use Google for

Yeah, aside from everything.

I use google for:

Email
Documents
Search
Blogging
Calendar
Photos (although I mostly use Flickr.)
Google Maps
Android phone (does this count if I don’t use google’s apps?)

Wow, that’s kind of staggering. I think there’s a thing called google-creep that happens, especially when you have an android phone and you slowly switch to more and more google services. That happened to me with Google Calendar and Picasa because of their android apps.

What can you do

Do I need to do anything? Me, personally? Probably yes. Just realizing the dependence is