Introduction

Rodney Dawes wrote an interesting post that I saw on Planet GNOME a few weeks back. Here’s one excerpt that I found noteworthy:

The Future is not your desktop. It is mobile devices. It is tablets. It is holographic displays and interfaces. It is flexible transparent screens. It is your television, your appliances, your home, your car. It is all the things we haven’t even scratched the surface of, for sensible user interface design. It is networked storage, with your content being accessible wherever you are, be it in your living room, kitchen, hotel 5000 miles away, or a boat in the middle of the ocean. If we want to move into the future, and not get left behind, we need to start thinking about this, not what new shiny method of accessing a 50 year old 2D desktop is best. None of them are best.

The bolded bit is particularly interesting. Cloud computing is not simply a phenomena that we’re likely to see at some point in the future. It’s already here. Today. Every time that someone uploads a photo to Flickr, they’re going out onto the cloud. Every blog post, Google Document, and even email is a little whisp in the clouds. This is where people are working, playing, living, and- most of all- sharing.

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