The amount of free space available on free webmail providers, and the free photo sites has been increasing to GB levels. The kind of content that can be posted is quite narrow however. Blogs are good for rants and the like, but unless there is something like pinning a blog as you would find in some web boards, it has limited utility. Photo sites seem to have started off to make money out of prints of photos, but they now seem to work on the network effect (volume will pay). This is quite dubious, but considering how the cost of storage is falling, not that outlandish. On the other hand, Yahoo seems to have abandoned geocities altogether, with the amount of space there stuck at 15 MB forever. I find that there are some sites offering 1 GB, but I don’t see much being written about it. But then, how much content can you really generate? If you are into video, there is always Youtube, which provides unlimited storage. Note that Youtube is afflicted with Google’s obsession with storing every little thing that you do.
Search Engines
Automated searching may get you the exact opposite of what you are looking for . A search in Google for “aspire one benchmark linux” has a bunch of links from CNET which talks about “the couldn’t run a benchmark on aspire one. ” Here Google outdoes itself by getting you the exact opposite of what you want. Keep up the good work!
I have the following theory about why the search quality is so bad: it is function of what people are searching for. If you look at the main pages at MSN or Yahoo, we can see that most of the search terms are the names of celebrities, and the “engine” doesn’t really have to do much work. What is pretty bad is that the bulk of the revenue of the search sites come from such searches, and they really don’t need to improve these other “marginal” searches to be effective. Specific technical queries in Google are really hopeless.
Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is a new term for a concept which is seen to be a big application of Web 2.0—namely running apps on the web. Now we have the application as well as the data stored on remote servers. If this sounds like a really bad idea to you, you are not alone.
While fierce competition has forced blogging sites to be very open about the data, this will not be the case for the kinds of software that are hosted in the “Cloud”. The only way to use the data would be to have the same apps running locally, which may not be possible technically or legally. If the company goes belly-up, are you supposed to run your own server with that software? When Sun was planning to release some code, they claimed that it was not possible because they had to get a release for every last bit of code that they had. Just look at the delay in getting Sun’s JDK into mainstream Linux distributions after it had become “open source”.
Tags: web accounts
