Random observations from the Cloudverse:

Wobbly Vids
A friend of mine who serves as the chief architect of a small start-up currently in beta in the SF Bay Area tripped over an unexpected problem with video posting at the company's cloud services provider. The company transcodes member videos, then posts them. They've been tweaking the process to eliminate occasional wobbles in the final files.

But re-posted vids had the same problems as the originals, which was confounding until they learned there was a 24-hour delay until vids go live, written into their SLA. They revised it to reduce the delay to one hour, but must still work around this...and consider what it means when membership ramps up.

Open the TwitDoor, HAL
I'm becoming more dependent on Twitter to refer people to my stories, to shout out to folks, and to post the occasional caustic barb when I've had too much coffee. But HAL (as I, and no doubt numerous others, refer to Twitter) has always been a little pissy and uncooperative. Now He's imposed the new Twitter on me--which I still don't like.

Then again, I'm still not down with Mountain Dew coming in cans rather than the original green bottles, so maybe I'll adjust to #newtwitter. But one thing for sure, HAL stutter-steps his way through my new timeline in a way that makes it almost unusable.

Kicking Down the Door
I don't understand why HAL hasn't offered hosting and applications, and tried to lure me in to use Him as my one-stop online cloud-based environment. I might even pay a low monthly fee if I knew the service would be fast and ad-free forever. But this would mean that I have, in fact, ceded control of my cyberlife (which is almost the same thing as my real life) to computers that are far, far away.

This aspect of Cloud is why commentators such as John C. Dvorak have expressed a loathing for it. And knowing with 100% certainty that a brown-shirted government will try to bully Twitter at any time into giving up whatever they have is absolutely chilling. 

This represents the biggest threat to Cloud Computing today. Technical issues over wobbly vids or stuttering timelines can be resolved; unwarranted government intrusion cannot.

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