sstream of consciousness

Recently Jeremy Zawodny speculated in his blog about future storage of personal data, suggesting that we will increasingly use highly mobile storage devices (like USB flash drives and iPods) along with data on servers in Internet ("data in a cloud") instead of cumbersome notebooks.

Not surprisingly, I constantly find myself following this trend. I keep more and more of my data on three kinds of servers: home server, my shared hosting server, free or paid service-specific servers. I use USB flash frive to backup and keep crucial data with me, but I do not use it for an occasional file transfers, beacuse I do it by uploading files on a server and downloading it later.

I'll probably write mor on that interesting and important topic later, but now I would like to share my experience about four probably most important data sets: e-mail, calendar, contacts, and bookmarks.

E-mail
I use fastmail.fm mail service and I even pay for it. All these free Web mail services like Yahoo! Mail, gmail and mail.ru are great, but they do not offer single most important feature I need: IMAP support, even for paid accounts (where they exist). I like to use my favourite mail client for all-things-mail - that gives me consistent set of features. And, of course, occasional Web access is very handy. I found it very surprising how many people do not even know what IMAP is, an even those who knew, did not understand why it is technically superior to POP in every aspect.

Calendar and address book
As a rule of thumb I always try to find a service that uses open and widely accepted standard and has many features. I am even willing to pay for it if necessary. Unfortunately, it is not always possible. For example, I could not find a good calendar server yet. I tried to use Yahoo! Calendar for a while, but neither it supports iCal, nor does it synchronize with my Palm very well.

For address book I am not even aware of some kind of widely accepted protocol for keeping contacts on server.

Bookmarks
Web bookmarks went a long path. I tried to use Yahoo! Bookmarks (Yahoo has a lot of great services indeed!). But over the time I found that it is easier to throw a good set of search terms into search engine and find what I need once again, than to maintain, categorize and outdate bookmark collection items. There are two problems with that though. First, sometimes I could not recall good search terms and process of search becomes long and daunting. Second, content may be relocated or even eliminated altogether. To tackle the first problem I re-iterated bookmarks once again. I started to use del.icio.us and "My Web" feature of My Yahoo! Search. Beacuse of the fact that del.icio.us keeps all bookmarks public (yeah, I know that this is the point), I stopped using it rather quickly. Yahoo My Web is great and I used it for some time until I discovered Furl. Unlike Yahoo, Furl allows you to save a copy of a page, make it either public or private, supports multiple categories. It even allows you to download a backup of your bookmarks and saved files, so you do not have to worry for your files in case these guys go out of business.

Posted in Software | Web frolov's blog | add new comment