Hosted Apps + Local Storage?

During the Office 2.0 Conference last month, I overheard someone ask Raju Vegesna from Zoho whether it's possible to edit a file on his hard drive with Zoho Writer without uploading it to Zoho's servers. The question didn't make sense at all. Hosted app + local storage seemed like the worst of both worlds. You'd lose the benefit of online collaboration AND the ability to work offline. But after reading Fred Wilson's Data Portability post, I'm starting to understand what that question was all about.

Fred writes that web apps ranging from Gmail to TypePad to FaceBook put your private data on someone else's servers. Secure as their hosting infrastructure might be, you do lose some degree of control. (Are those messages you deleted from Gmail really, really gone? And could they ever be subpoenaed?)  Instead, Fred says web app providers should offer customers two other options: (a) store data on a third-party system such as Amazon's S3, or (b) save it on dumb storage appliances.

In my imagination, you’d simply put the appliance on your network, get an IP address, and enter that IP address in the web app storage configuration page and all your data goes there instead. I am guessing that it’s not that simple, and certainly firewalls wreak havoc on this scheme, but I do think it’s not impossible to do this simply and easily.

Josh Reich points out that (b) won't work "until Internet connectivity speeds (megabits) approaches disk access speeds (many many gigabits)". If you need to perform a search across 2GB of locally stored Gmail messages, it'd take quite a while for Google to query your disk over a DSL line.

But option (a) is fascinating. Rich Hekker agrees that a "meta networking tool" would be useful  (though he doesn't think there's a viable business model). It would export social networking profiles and photos/videos/documents, and seamlessly move this information between different online services and web apps.

I think Jon Udell might like that. He recently wrote:

I refuse to invest in closed social networks. Life's too short to participate actively in LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Flickr, and all the rest. I'm a citizen of the Internet, but beyond that I neither have nor want an allegiance to artificial communities defined arbitarily by particular software and network architectures.

Stowe Boyd, too, has complained that:

I love Del.icio.us, Flickr, and Upcoming.org, but why do I have completely unintegrated buddylists in each? Why do these all have different models of sharing and visibility? Different profiles? No integration with Messenger? It's enough to make my teeth itch.

So imagine if you could have a web-based storage vault and a digital passport, of sorts, which would allow  the same photos (if you so choose) to be viewed on Flickr and SmugMug, the same bookmarks to appear on del.icio.us and  ma.gnolia, the same documents to be editable via Zoho or Google web-office apps, the same profile data/contacts to be available across any social network you join...

Would that be a good thing? Or would it make differentiation impossible?

PS - Just read Rafe Needleman's review of OmniDrive. It integrates the files you've stored on various Web services (Flickr and Zoho, to begin with) into one virtual drive, which you can access from your own computer's desktop or its web interface. Rafe also reviewed FindMeOn and Profilactic, which let you create/track multiple social networking profiles.

Comments

[Nik Cubrilovic]

Hi Isabel,

Off course this would be a good thing! After all, it is your data and content so you should be free to access it. I am the founder and CEO of Omnidrive - what you describe is what we do. The idea is that you can aggregate all your content and files from across different web applications and devices and have them all in one place. The way it appears is your files from your web applications get cached with Omnidrive, and from there you can open them up on your desktop or drag them into another folder which is linked to another app.

The part that we are having problems with is writing the content back to the app, reading it is easy enough - Omnidrive supports reading from RSS, Atom, WebDAV, but writing back to these services is a bit more difficult as we have had to write plugins to Omnidrive to support each app. We are launching next week at the Web 2.0 conference, and what we are hoping to do is to get web application developers to support our file posting interface in their apps. What this looks like is simply RSS but the other way around (2-way RSS). Omnidrive will use the same feed URI but when the user saves a file it will POST the content back. We have a name for this system and we will publish a draft of what we hope will become a standard.

To take it a step further, an application developer can actually use Omnidrive storage as their app storage, so Omnidrive serves as the place where these files are rather than just a cache. If you would like to take a look at Omnidrive then send an email to beta@omnidrive.com and I will send you an invite.

Good post and summary of different views, everything described is very possible :)

Nik

[Raju Vegesna]

Isabel:

Currently, when documents/photos/videos etc move from a PC to the web, they end up in multiple services due to the lack of a single integration point. The integration point should be revolve around content. Also, the option has to be given to the user on where/how his data be kept.

I think OmniDrive understands this space perfectly and is moving in the right direction.

Nik: I'd be glad to discuss further on saving the files back to your service. I'll be at the Web 2.0 conference. We probably can catch up on this.

Raju
Zoho

[Isabel Wang]

Wow - 2-way RSS. So you'll be able to stream data in and out of any app in real time? Now that's a neat idea!

I was just reading this post (http://www.watchmojo.com/web/blog/?p=530) on RSS being the hot concept for 2007 (as reference points, Froosh calls 2006 the year of online video, and 2005 the year of social networks). He might not know how right he is :)