Defrag and Glue are two delightful conferences pondering the scope of real-time web services and social relations, with only a fraction of the marketing of larger conferences like Web 2.0. This year’s Defrag 2009 at the Denver Hyatt included an interesting dissection of cloud-based compute services relevant to mobile client communities. Some of the discussions and demonstrations upended many assumptions that IT traditionalists bring to netbook and smartbook worlds.
When we talk about shared apps in a cloud environment where a client has little to no local storage, usually the first concerns that come to mind are the security of the individual and his/her apps in the cloud, and the safety of entrusting large amounts of data to a cloud, when there is no local replication. But that’s assuming a rather static view of data, more akin to the client-server realm of the 1990s.
Another layer of imponderables arises when one looks at how much of modern computing involves real-time streams of communication, rather than the manipulation of static documents. Even the folks working to some extent in the latter realm have to treat the “versioning” of documents in a far more complex manner than the Lotus Notes model of yore. Jen Grant of Box.net (in video above) showed me how a variety of traditional and mobile clients will share documents in ways that treat versions of such documents as a live feed. In essence, tracking a document’s validity looks a lot more like a Facebook “Status Update” or a Google Wave interface than anything we might consider from a traditional IT perspective.
In fact, the theme of 21st-century computing embraced at Defrag tends to discount Qualcomm’s view of strict segmentation between smartphones and smartbooks, and not just from a hardware perspective. In the view of Defrag wags, all compute services from this point forward will be dominated by isochronous real-time streams in which data is shared by social groups, and rarely acted upon in the nature of an Oracle database or Excel spreadsheet. Thus, everything becomes a river of real-time data. If it’s two minutes old, it’s obsolete; if it’s two days old; it’s archival history; if it’s two weeks old, it’s forgotten in the torrent of real-time streams.
Tomorrow, I’ll talk a bit about what that means for the data repository side of the street. But the problem I want to leave you with today is one of user interface and form factor. Vendors in a variety of cloud-based application realms are making their user interfaces represent the update streams we see in real-time social networks. Just as a limit of 140 characters can lead to either brilliant brevity or superficiality, a list of rapidly-moving real-time streams can make the eyes glaze over, leave the stomach queasy, and make a content aggregator long for a unifying theme amidst the noise.
As several Defrag speakers emphasized, this should not necessarily make us worried about how the very nature of consciousness is changing with such real-time tools. But it should make us think twice about user interfaces and ergonomics. Lotus Notes was launched with an email model precisely at a time when email was being made partially obsolete. Cloud-based apps are being launched with update-list interfaces, just as Twitter and Facebook are at the peak of popularity. Does this really represent the optimal way to view data shared in the cloud? Tomorrow, I’ll raise some further issues on how content is managed and data is viewed.
Loring
