Living in the cloud

Well, it's my first macro-blog in a while. Ironically enough, it's microblogging that brought on this post.

You see, I, like many others, have recently discovered that microblogging, like Twitter, is about more than just letting the world know where you are and what you are doing from moment to moment (which seemed to me kind of dull and pointless, which is why I waited this long to try Twitter out). Of course, once I actually tried Twitter I found it has far more interesting uses, like posting some of those interesting facts or thoughts I sometimes have but which are to short for a full blog post.
But alas, it wasn't long before I was also introduced to the fail whale. This is what got me looking for alternatives to Twitter, preferably open source. This led me naturally to identi.ca. I tried posting here a few times, but in the end no-one I knew used identi.ca or would consider using it: if identi.ca hadn't offered to cross-post my updates to Twitter, no one would have read them. As for people to follow on identi.ca myself, I found that my tollerance for uninteresting dents decreased dramatically for people I didn't know.

So, I tried installing the laconi.ca microblogging service directly on my new VPS host: redgeonline.net. This went well, though it was a major pain that although I could create CSS for my custom skin (with the bamboo background, the one that integrates with the rest of my site: I've been thinking about moving this blog to that skin but I like the current one too much), I couldn't alter the output HTML. Tip to laconi.ca: no templating system is a major feature gap, fill it!
Well, here the trouble really started: what I wanted, and what didn't seem like a big deal what with all that talk of API's and open protocols, was a simple list with the updates of me and all my friends, no matter where they came from: Twitter or a laconi.ca host or something else. I wanted this list on my own server, not via yet another 3rd party service. Unfortunately, though laconi.ca allows you to automatically cross-post to Twitter via the Twitter API and to retrieve my friends so that I can automatically subscribe to them should they get an account on my server (which I doubt, and even then I'd be aware of it anyway), it's impossible to pull in friends' status updates. Why is this, I wonder? The API is there, is laconi.ca simply to proud to use it?

Normally I love the cloud: I've been using Google Apps ever since each of them came out. The driving factor: reliability and access. I can access my data from everywhere, and I can rest assured that it will not be lost overnight. Google reader makes sure that what I mark as read stays read across computers. Google calendar, which now even syncs with my Windows mobile phone, has my calendar items going back years: I've never lost anything because of faulty syncing, device malfunction, etc. (unlike the calendar I used to keep using Outlook). And Gmail: it just keeps getting better and better.

But on the other hand, since I've started investing more and more time into setting things up on my own server, I've been getting more and more sympathetic to the autonomo.us philosophy: let users stay in charge of their own data. On the one hand this would counter the reliability factor which I just pointed out, but on the other hand there's nothing like being in complete control of your own online presence (I must have profiles on more sites than I dare to count, and I maintain and update none of them).

The drawback, I'm finding, is that the cloud is not yet as accessible as advertised, and that if you want to connect to people, you're still forced to use 3rd party apps. Staying in charge of your own data, though idealistic, for now comes down to a lot of added effort and an end-result that is still miles behind the leading edge of 3rd party apps. So for now, I'm content to be another Google fanboy and to leave outdated breadcrumbs of my presence all over the web. The day that these traces are all drawn together will come in the end.