Writely Right?
Slashdot just introduced me to Writely, an online word processing application. Writely is another software from Google designed to create a totally online user experience. Why do it with desktop applications (MS Office or Open Office) when you can do it online (with Writely)?
Web 2.0
Web 2.0 is a neologism for the new way of using the internet. O’Reilly Media envisioned a web that allowed users to do everything (well, ideally everything) in the internet. The internet could be a platform where online services would replace local applications. Everything can be customized according to the user’s preferences, wants and needs. Data would be stored online, allowing the user to resume their work anywhere they have a compatible browser and an internet connection.
One of the key players in this endeavor is Google. Assuming that the internet develops as the platform to be in in the future, we can see why Google is investing so much on ventures that are bent on keeping people online longer within the range of their services (or ads, if you will).
Concerns
While many people are excited about the progress and development of the Web platform, there are some concerns with regards to such technology.
- The need for an internet connection that can provide a satisfying user experience. With a more dynamic and richer user experience, we are currently looking at web services that consume a lot of bandwidth where delayed response from the application is more of the rule rather than the exception.
- Data security becomes an issue. Since our data will be stored online, sensitive information become exposed to more vulnerabilities and misuse.
My Way
If there were something that can be done about the above situation, I’d wait until everyone got ultrafast internet connection. A lot of people are still using internet connections below 10Mbps. Performance really takes a lot of beating with such limited bandwidth.
But why is Google doing it now? So that when the internet connection technology becomes available to a lot of people, they’ll have decent working applications and one hell of a barrier entry to late adopters. That, or simply because they can.
In addition to that, I’d also require dedicated IPs for the internet connections of subscribers to such online services. In this way, data need not be saved inside the data centers of the service providers. An interface from the online applications could provide access to the hard drives of the machines. These machines can be located in the internet using the dedicated IPs.
Wouldn’t we run out of IP addresses with such setup? No doubt about it. However, there are many ways to skin a cat. For instance, we could *upgrade* our current IP address setup to accept more addresses. Instead of using IPv4, we could use IPv6 (yes, i know there are a lot of issues to tackle with regards to such change in standards, but that is set for an entirely different article). OR we could set up NAT service providers that can lease IP addresses ala VPN-style. This is something like what Hamachi does.
As much as I’m pleased with such developments, online applications still remain unviable at the moment. Being expensive and impractical, we still has a long way to go before locally-sourced applications (within the intranet, for you nitpickers) are displaced by their online counterparts.